Between all the talk about tax commissions and streamlining agencies, it seems the question of the day is how to make the US government work more efficiently. There is no shortage of ideas about what should be cut and by how much. Before taking any action, the officials should take a look at one recent research article published by a set of economists in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the profession’s most esteemed journal, provides a case study in efficiency.

The study is an accounting of the cost of personal audits performed by the Internal Revenue Service in relation to the taxes paid as a result of the audits. These in-person audits, as opposed to “correspondence audits” where the IRS requests information by letter, can be labor intensive and expensive to administer. The researchers found that personal audits take just under 30 hours of work on average and cost the agency $5,900. The return is more than double, however, at $14,200, suggesting that for every dollar spent on audits, $2.17 is returned through taxes collected.