IRS audits completed

Between 2015 and 2023, the IRS completed steadily fewer audits — dropping from roughly 1.2 million to around 600,000 — while Netflix released an ever-increasing number of original titles, reaching over 500 in some years, with the two moving in opposite directions at r = -0.9673. The conspiracy-minded reader will note that as Netflix produced more content, Americans had less time to commit tax fraud carefully, reducing the evidentiary yield of audits and therefore IRS motivation. This is not what happened. What happened is that Congress underfunded the IRS while Netflix overfunded its content budget, and both trends continued on their separate trajectories, indifferent to each other's existence.

IRS audit completions declined sharply from 2015 to 2023 due to sustained budget cuts and staffing reductions, with the agency losing roughly 30% of its workforce over a decade and audit rates falling to 50-year lows by 2022. Netflix original production expanded aggressively from 2015 onward as the company shifted from a licensing model to content ownership, increasing original releases year over year to compete with Disney+, HBO Max, and other streaming entrants. Both trends reflect opposite institutional trajectories — one of public sector resource contraction, one of private sector capital deployment — that coincidentally moved in opposite directions across the same nine years.

A strong negative correlation between a declining public institution and an expanding private one is a statement about the political economy of the 2015-2023 period as much as it is a statistical artifact. The data is accidentally telling a true story about where resources flowed — it's just attributing causation to the wrong mechanism entirely.