There's a good Wall Street Journal article today on the importance of estate tax audits. But it's missing some critical context. On one of the people in the story, a former estate tax auditor: Ms. New started auditing estate-tax returns in the IRS's Detroit office in the 1980s. She managed an estate-tax group from 2001 until early this year, when she took a buyout and went into private practice. At the end of last year, IRS offered early retirement buyouts to nearly half of all estate tax auditors. Ms. New may not have taken this particular offer, but the timing certainly raise quesitons in my mind about whether her retirement was part of a larger event. The article should have included this information. IRS cannot do as many of these audits anymore, now that so many estate tax auditors have taken buyouts. This point seems relevant enough to include in an article about how some heirs would game the system were it not for diligent estate tax audits.