Serious tax noncompliance

An Empirical Examination of Corporate Tax Noncompliance

This paper was prepared for the conference on Taxing Corporate Income in the 21 Century, jointly sponsored by the Office of Tax Policy Research at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and held in Ann Arbor on May 5 and 6, 2005. We appreciate guidance on dat...

The Distribution of Income Tax Noncompliance

This paper uses newly available data from the IRS to assess the distributional consequences of U.S. federal income tax noncompliance for the tax year 2001. We fi nd that, when taxpayers are arrayed by their estimated “true” income, defi ned as reported income adjusted for underreporting, the ratio of aggregate misreported income to true income generally increases with income, although it peaks ...

Trends as Changes in Variance: The Case of Tax Noncompliance

In a recent survey, Schneider and Enste (2000) report that the “shadow” economies of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations grew from 11.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1989-90 to 16.9 percent of GDP in 1996-97. After reviewing a number of factors that could account for this trend, the authors conclude, “an increasing burden of taxation and Social Secu...

Redistribution Through the Income Tax: The Vertical and Horizontal Effects of Noncompliance and Tax Evasion

This paper uses the unique Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program (TCMP) micro data to study the equity effects of noncompliance. We access four years of TCMP data, 1979, 1982, 1985, and 1988. The TCMP data allows us to observe income and taxes before and after a tax audit. In order to generate a range of scalar estimates of the redistributive impact of more complete compliance we employ the f...

An Emissions Tax in Siberia: Economic Theory, Firm Response, and Noncompliance in Imperfect Markets