The good news, I suppose, is that there is almost no chance your non-profit organization will ever face an IRS audit. This is not my opinion. The numbers don't lie.

In 2009 the IRS audited approximately 1,723 of the existing 800,000 tax-exempt organizations. The arithmetic is pretty straightforward: The chances of any single organization facing an audit during any year are about two in a thousand. When you consider that lately the IRS has tended to focus its audits on specific categories of non-profits (e.g. universities, credit counseling groups, etc.), your risk of an audit diminishes to infinitesimal if you aren't in one of the categories.

Consider also that the already thinly staffed IRS simply can't keep up with the workload. In one recent three-year period, the number of charities increased by 38 percent even as the IRS staff available for audits actually declined. By one calculation, there is only one IRS enforcement agent available for every 4,000 tax-exempt entities. The prospect that this ratio will change for the better is highly unlikely with a proposed federal employee wage freeze and a new Congress looking to cut the size of the government.