Following a recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) report that showed people in rural and low-income areas of the country are audited at higher rates than those in other areas, Sen. Doug Jones, D-AL, demanded an explanation from IRS Commissioner Charles Reting.

“To concentrate so exclusively on this subset of taxpayers defies explanation,” Jones said in a letter sent Thursday. “This is no anomaly. The chances of an IRS audit seem to correlate nearly exactly with the taxpayer’s proximity to either the rural Southeast or, in several cases, to Native American reservations.”

The report showed that nearly every county in Alabama was audited at a higher rate than the national average, with the highest rates happening in areas of the Black Belt.

Dallas County filings were audited at a rate of 10.1 per 1,000 – the national rate is 7.7 per 1,000.

According to an analysis published by ProPublica, a non-profit public interest news organization, the report indicated that the counties with the highest audit rates “are all predominantly African American, rural counties in the Deep South.”

In Jones letter, he notes that Greene County, which has a population of 8,330 with a median household income of less than $21,000 annually, taxpayers were audited “over 40 percent more than the national average, including areas that are much more urban and wealthy.”

For comparison, Jones noted that Bergen County, New Jersey, with nearly a million residents and a median household income of more than $90,000 annually, taxpayers were audited at a rate matching the national average.

“According to IRS statistics, the annual ‘tax gap,’ or the gros gap between total taxes owed and total traxes paid on time was over $450 billion,” Jones said in the letter. “To take such a large portion of limited IRS resources and to focus them so intensely on rural communities in Alabama and the Southeast makes little fiscal sense. Moreover, the practice appears to be blatantly discriminatory.”

Jones encouraged the IRS to “undertake a full and thorough review of the policies and practices that led to such a disparate geographic impact of its annual audits” and posed a series of questions for the department since it appeared to show an “overwhelming focus” on people in Alabama.

Among the questions Jones posed to the department were whether the department had “any official policy dictating that low-income or rural geographic areas be subjected to increased audits,” if the IRS considers “the taxpayer’s address in determining whether to conduct an audit” and more.