alt Hacker NewsThere are substantial indirect costs not accounted for in that ratio. Anywhere close to 1:1 is a large net loss to the government. Your mental model of the cost effectiveness of audits completely ignores large second-order effects.
The Federal government has a century of empirical data on this. They set their targets accordingly, which as a heuristic is roughly optimal at around 10:1. This may not be intuitive to you. It wasn’t to me either until I worked at a Federal audit agency. Most of it actually makes sense once you understand the bigger picture.
Second order effects is where the real damage is done.
That extra tax specialist could have been an additional production line worker, which would have created volume, which would have lowered prices, which would have made inputs for other goods cheaper, etc.
It is really wild when you think at a macro level, how much value is destroyed, all due to indirect costs which are extremely difficult to estimate.