Last mentioned: Mar 23, 2026
GAO Audit Confirmation
Government Accountability Office confirms the increased use of machine learning in audit selection.
DIF Scoring Phase
Automated systems assign risk scores to returns based on statistical deviations.
FY 2024 Commencement
IRS begins processing the 266 million returns for the fiscal year.
The IRS audited over 505,000 tax returns in fiscal year 2024, utilizing the advanced Discriminant Function System (DIF) and machine learning to identify high-risk filings. This shift toward algorithmic enforcement marks a significant evolution in regulatory oversight, focusing on statistical anomalies and third-party data cross-referencing.
This page surfaces every story mentioning Discriminant Function System across our legal 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 legal 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. |