Last mentioned: Mar 23, 2026
Processing Phase
IRS processes 266 million individual and business tax returns.
The IRS audited over 500,000 tax returns in fiscal year 2024, utilizing advanced machine learning and the Discriminant Function System (DIF) to target high-risk filings. While the overall audit rate remains low relative to the 266 million returns processed, the agency is increasingly focused on deviations from statistical norms and income-based red flags.
This page surfaces every story mentioning Discriminant Function System across our finance coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running finance beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where Discriminant Function System was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |