Why are people getting audited with eic

[Opus 17]

It's not exactly an audit.

Your employer reports your wages to you and to the IRS, and the IRS is supposed to match your tax return to your wages to make sure you pay the proper tax.  The most common form of tax fraud is to file a fake return with fake income that is just enough to get a large EIC refund.  Since the IRS didn't use to match up wages to tax returns until after April 15, the fake EIC refunds would be paid and the crooks long gone by the time the IRS figured out it was a fraudulent return.

As part of passing some tax cuts, Congress last year mandated that the IRS had to hold EIC refunds until February 15 and they had to make more efforts to match tax returns with income reported by employers, so the fraudulent EIC refunds are never paid in the first place.