Under pressure from a conservative Congress, guided by an administration shaped by high rollers and high brackets, the Internal Revenue Service is pursuing a bold new strategy in tax enforcement:

Don’t follow the money.

And don’t tell anybody about it.

According to this year’s report from the IRS taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, the IRS spends a huge proportion of its enforcement resources on the Earned Income Tax Credit, a credit for the working poor started during the Reagan administration. Over the last five years, the IRS used a computer program to freeze 1.6 million applications for the credit, without telling the applicants that they were suspected of anything.

But the agency was following a congressional mandate to crack down on those poor people.

As Olson points out, there are a couple of things wrong with this strategy.

First, the computer’s not much of an accountant. Auditing a sample of the frozen applications, Olson’s staff found that 66 percent of those applying were entitled to the tax credit they were claiming, 14 percent were entitled to a credit smaller than they were claiming, and few of the remaining 20 percent actually were committing fraud.

Worse, from the point of view of an agency whose job it is to shake the change out of the nation’s couch cushions, there’s not a lot of money to be gained from jumping on the working poor. The most fevered estimates claim the tax credit program might have up to $9 billion in fraud, Olson writes, while the cash economy out there, drawing much less IRS attention, accounts for about $100 billion in unpaid taxes.

“That’s where the money is. There’s no money in the poor,” says Robert McIntyre, executive director of Citizens for Tax Justice, putting his finger on one of the eternal truths of both life and accounting.

But the IRS, he admits, is just following orders.

“If you cheat a lot on your taxes, Congress doesn’t mind,” McIntyre explains, “but if you cheat a little on your taxes, Congress does mind, because you’re probably a Democrat.”

Or at least you’re probably someone without a political action committee.

There’s a third reason, off the spreadsheet, why this seems a curious strategy to impose on the Internal Revenue Service. Since the Earned Income Tax Credit was begun during the Reagan administration, and expanded during the Clinton administration, it has been considered one of the most effective, and broadest, federal anti-poverty programs.

At a time when, according to the federal government’s own figures, both poverty and hunger are statistically rising, it seems a curious moment to send the IRS out after the tax credit program. Among the 1.6 million claims frozen by the IRS, the average family income was just over $13,000.

So it seemed easier for the IRS just not to tell them there was a problem.

You can see why Olson, as the agency’s taxpayer advocate, considers this a big deal – especially since it was all kept pretty quiet.

“We are all somewhat blown away by this,” said Bob Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C. “We had not been aware that something of this magnitude was going on.”

What was known was that Congress had made it clear, through hearings and instructions and budget cuts, that it didn’t want the IRS applying heavy resources to upper-income tax issues.

Families earning around $13,000 a year, of course, were something else.

“It’s like those errors were more offensive to (Congress) than errors involving higher-income payers,” Greenstein said.

“It’s part of the double standard involved here.”

If the folks currently running Washington are more worried about small low-income fraud than much bigger upper-income fraud, well, there’s no accounting for taste.

But in this tax enforcement strategy, there’s no accounting for accounting.