IRS Audited Black Taxpayers More Frequently Reportedly Due to Algorithm

July 18, 2008

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reportedly audited Black taxpayers more frequently due to the design of their algorithms, focusing on easier-to-conduct audits. This supposed bias unintentionally correlated with a pattern of tax filing errors within this demographic group.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

GOVERN 3.1 — similarity 0.644, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.644, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.630, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: internal-revenue-service
Alleged developer: internal-revenue-service
Alleged harmed parties: black-taxpayers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/461

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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