In 1995 a group of 1724 randomly selected Minnesota taxpayers was informed by letter that the returns they were about to file would be ‘closely examined’. Compared to a control group that did not receive this letter, low and middle-income taxpayers in the treatment group on average increased tax payments compared to the previous year, which we interpret as indicating the presence of noncomplian...

We report results from a large online randomised tax experiment in Guatemala. The trial involves short messages and choices presented to taxpayers as part of a CAPTCHA pop-up window immediately before they file a tax return, with the aim of priming honest declarations. In total our sample includes 627,242 taxpayers and 3,232,430 tax declarations made over four months. Treatments include: honest...

Through the Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare and other efforts, policy makers have begun to redesign Medicare to meet long-term challenges that include an aging population, rising per capita health care costs, and an inadequate benefit package. However, no proposal as of yet fully addresses Medicare's financing needs. Without any changes, revenues from taxpayers to the program ...

Most state and local retirement plans strive for full funding, at least by actuarial standards. Funding measured at market values fluctuates and often falls short. A common argument for full funding is that pensions are a form of deferred compensation that does not justify a debt. The paper examines public finance, political economy, and financial market issues that bear on optimal funding, bro...

Under what conditions does, or should, a collective of rational individuals support the imposition of a binding constraint on their own collective action? Our innovation is to allow citizen-taxpayers in a standard political economy model to be risk-averse and uncertain about the future average cost of the collective good, their own future income or wealth, and the future distribution of the tax...

Abstract—The reasons that explain different behaviors towards tax obligations in similar countries are not completely understood yet. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and compare the factors that influence tax morale levels in Portugal and Spain. We use data from European Values Study (EVS). Using a sample of 2,652 individuals, a factor analysis was used to extract the underlying d...

Internal Revenue Service data indicate that $4.4 billion in excess EITC was claimed for tax year 1994, largely due to violations of the qualifying child eligibility criteria. I find that the probability of misreporting a child is increasing in the size of the EITC and tax benefit. The estimated effect of the EITC on compliance is statistically significant, but modest in size. Reducing the size ...

Several administrations have adopted electronic fiscal devices (EFDs) in their quest to combat noncompliance, particularly as regards sales and the value-added tax (VAT) payable on sales. The introduction of EFDs typically requires considerable effort and has costs both for the administration and for the taxpayers that are affected by the requirements of the new rules. Despite their widespread ...

P ublicly funded research involves the distribution of a considerable amount of money. Funding agencies such as the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the European Research Council (ERC) give billions of dollars or euros of taxpayers’ money to individual researchers, research teams, universities, and research institutes each year. Taxpayers acco...

Tax administrations in most countries have more corporate and personal information than any other government office. Data mining techniques can be used in many different problems due to the large amount of tax returns received every year. In the present work we show an essay of the Brazilian Tax Administration on using Bayesian networks to predict taxpayers behavior based on historical analysis...