IRS audits completed

The observation that the tax authority and the bowling alley have been losing members together is the sort of thing that makes a statistician put down their coffee. Neither, one assumes, is doing it on purpose. The bowling balls do not pay taxes, and the audits do not wear rented shoes.

IRS audit completions have been declining for years due to budget cuts and staff shortages, and 2020 was especially brutal as covid closed field offices and paused in-person audits. US bowling centers, already in long decline, suffered a catastrophic 2020 as lockdown orders closed hundreds permanently. Two different kinds of emptied room, one with a lane and one with a filing cabinet.

So the correlation is a tidy summary of institutional shrinkage, punctuated sharply by a pandemic. Both trends were already heading down; covid just leaned on them. The strike and the audit both missed their shot.