IRS: Clusters of Potential Tax Cheats in Acworth

If you're a small business owner in Acworth, you may be more likely to be audited. The Internal Revenue Service has identified this city as having some of the biggest concentrations of potential tax cheats in the country.

Gaining access to 2009 data in a effort to determine why some taxpayers are more likely to cheat, the Taxpayer Advocate, an independent IRS office, used confidential tax returns to identify clusters of possible cheats in more than 350 communities, the Associated Press reports.

The IRS uses the data to target taxpayers for audits, assigning scores to each tax return that indicate the likelihood agents would collect additional money as the result of an audit.

The study focused on sole proprietorships, which account for two-thirds of all U.S. business, and found the median scores for sole proprietorships in the 350 communities were among some of the highest in the country.

Acworth is one of the more than 70 Georgia cities with large clusters of the highest scores. Nearby Cartersville, Dallas, Douglasville and Hiram are also on the list, provided by the taxpayer advocate and published on CBS News.