Las Vegans rush to beat tax deadline

Cherie Gouker was one of the last-minute tax filers at the James Brown Jr. Mail Facility on Sunset Road Thursday night, and like many Las Vegans she felt relieved after dropping off her tax return.

"I probably will be here again next year, because I always seem to wait until the last minute," Gouker said. "It's kind of fun to come down here tonight, and it's always nice to be done with it."

But before Gouker and other Las Vegans breath a sigh of relief and push the IRS from their minds, they may want to make sure the Internal Revenue Service is finished with them.

If there was a tax-based TV game show an audit would be the parting gift that no one really wants, and the hosts at the IRS are certain to be delivering this special gift to some Las Vegans.

"Two years ago we stopped keeping track of the exact numbers of audits in city's and went to a regional system," IRS spokeswoman Jodi Patterson said. "The southwest region, which includes Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico does have a slightly higher number of audits than the national average."

In 1996, the last year that audits were tracked in individual cities, Las Vegas residents were almost twice as likely to be audited as anyone else in the nation.

Businesses that deal in large amounts of cash, like casinos, will raise the rate of audits in an area, Patterson said.

Add in the fact that Las Vegas is a tip town and it's easy to see why the audit rate has been high in the past, but Patterson said that may be changing.

"In the last couple of years the IRS has worked out tip agreements with businesses that set aside a percentage at the start and eliminates a lot of problems," Patterson said.

If you've already started thinking about trying to avoid an audit next year, Patterson says accuracy is your best defense.

"There's not really one or two things that we look for," Patterson said. "We look at each return and they're all scored and those with the most errors are looked at again."

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