It bears repeating

Small businesses beware: IRS audit rates rising

Is your business ready for a visit from the IRS?

In the last five years, the number of hours the IRS spent auditing small businesses with assets of $10 million or less increased by 30 percent, according to a recent study by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In the same time period, the time the IRS spent auditing companies with $250 million or more in assets dropped by 33 percent.

The average number of hours spent on each audit of large corporations also went down, from 973 in 2005 to 830 in 2009. By contrast, the average number of hours spent on a small or mid-sized business audit remained substantially the same.

Read the report here.