Collaborative Research on the Relationship between Income Tax Auditing and Compliance

所得税审计与合规关系的协同研究

• 批准号: 8704443
• 负责人: Michael Graetz
• 金额: $ 5.02万
• 依托单位: Yale University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1988
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1988-03-15 至 1990-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8704443&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Relationship; between; Income

Tax noncompliance is widely recognized to be an extremely serious problem. Recent estimates suggest that at least $90 billion of taxable income goes unreported annually--an average of 10 to 15 percent of total taxable income. Concern about declining tax compliance has produced an outburst of policy and academic writing, but both the causes and the appropriate responses remain controversial. Early tax compliance literature treated tax compliance as a "portfolio problem," deriving rules for optimal consumption of the "risky asset" (unreported income) under the assumption that the probability of detection is fixed. These models produced ambiguous results. More recent theoretical innovations have attempted to move out of the decision-theoretic framework to a principal-agent problem and game-theoretic model. In these approaches the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is allowed to act strategically, conditioning its audit rules on the information it receives from taxpayers. These interactive models, developed by Wilde, Reinganum and Graetz under a previous NSF grant, yield predictions about the nature of the equilibrium audit rule used by the IRS and the equilibrium reporting rule used by taxpayers. The purpose of this research is to test a game-theoretic model and to develop empirical evidence on the relationship between audits and compliance. Three distinct data sets are analyzed: (a) a cross-section data set related to 1969 individual Federal Income Tax returns, which was assembled by the IRS in the seventies; (b) a cross-section, time series data set related to state-level variables for the period 1969-1985; and (c) a data set related to 1979 TCMP individual return items, which was recently assembled by the IRS. The major question to be addressed is whether, and in what fashion, audit rates respond interactively to the compliance behavior of taxpayers. The introduction of IRS as a strategic actor is considered to be a significant improvement in the economic theory of law enforcement generally. The behavioral framework of tax non- compliance makes it an especially appropriate case for an empirical test of the theoretical construct that explicitly takes into account the interactions and responses of the cognizant law enforcement agency. The research is of substantial scientific significance in that it promises not only to offer insights on an important policy issue but also to add powerfully to fundamental knowledge of the conditions that engender conformance to law.

人们普遍认为，税收不遵守是一个极其严重的问题。最近的估计表明，每年至少有900亿美元的应税收入没有上报，平均占总应税收入的10%到15%。对税收合规性下降的担忧引发了大量政策和学术文章，但其原因和适当的应对措施仍存在争议。早期的纳税遵从文献将纳税遵从视为一个“投资组合问题”，在发现概率是固定的假设下，推导出“风险资产”(未报告收入)的最优消费规则。这些模型产生了模棱两可的结果。最近的理论创新试图走出决策理论框架，转向委托代理问题和博弈论模型。在这些方法中，国税局(IRS)被允许采取战略性行动，其审计规则以从纳税人那里获得的信息为条件。这些由Wilde、Reinganum和Graetz在之前的NSF拨款下开发的互动模型，产生了对美国国税局使用的均衡审计规则的性质以及纳税人使用的均衡报告规则的预测。这项研究的目的是检验博弈论模型，并就审计与合规之间的关系发展经验证据。分析了三个不同的数据集：(A)美国国税局在1970年代汇编的与1969年个人所得税申报单有关的横截面数据集；(B)1969-1985年期间与州一级变量有关的横截面时间序列数据集；以及(C)国税局最近汇编的与1979年《议定书》个别退回项目有关的数据集。需要解决的主要问题是，审计率是否以及以何种方式对纳税人的合规行为做出互动反应。国税局作为一种战略行为者的引入被认为是执法经济理论的一项重大改进。税收不遵从的行为框架使其成为对明确考虑认知执法机构的互动和反应的理论构建进行实证检验的特别合适的案例。这项研究具有重大的科学意义，因为它不仅承诺为一个重要的政策问题提供见解，而且还将有力地增加对导致遵守法律的条件的基本知识。