Experimental Evidence of the Effectiveness of Mechanisms Designed to Increase Tax Compliance

旨在提高税收合规性的机制有效性的实验证据

• 批准号: 1559367
• 负责人: Benjamin Olken
• 金额: $ 10.11万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-05-01 至 2022-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1559367&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Experimental; Evidence; Effectiveness; Mechanisms; Designed

Experimental Evidence of the Effectiveness of Mechanisms Designed to Increase Tax Compliance - Abstract Low tax revenues significantly limit governments' ability to provide essential public services. Despite the gravity of this problem, few systematic attempts have been made to design and evaluate feasible, scalable ways to enhance revenue collection and public sector performance. Through four related but distinct studies, this project will fill this gap by examining the impact of incentive policies on public employee performance, as well as the roles of citizen engagement and tax collectors' ability on revenue collection. Given the critical importance of these issues and the embedded and sustained nature of the researcher-policymaker partnerships, the results will provide practical guidance on increasing tax revenues to a large audience of policymakers worldwide. While there has been significant work done on the optimal design of statutory taxes (e.g., Pomeranz 2014, Kleven and Waseem 2013), there has been less focus on increasing revenue and enforcement within a given system of taxation. This project seeks to explore enforcement and compliance issues contributing to the low collection of urban property taxes and examine the effectiveness of schemes designed to address those issues. The project consists of four studies. The first is a new randomized trial that addresses tax morale and the willingness of citizens to pay taxes. This component seeks to strengthen the link between tax payment and service provision by eliciting taxpayers' service preferences and sharing this information with their local governments. Localities will be randomly assigned to either receive the information from this preference elicitation or not, and those that receive it will be randomly assigned to allocate a portion of their budgets based on taxpayer preferences or to spend as normal. Tracking revenues, allocations, service provision, and citizen beliefs will provide a clean empirical estimate of the impact of these schemes on taxpayer attitudes and actual revenues. The next two studies focus on incentivizing tax collector performance. In the second study, tax collectors were randomly assigned to compete for preferable job postings based on their performance, which was measured by the increase in recovery or the tax base. This design allows for clean testing of the impact of these non-financial incentives on revenues and collector behavior, which will be analyzed during the course of this project. The third study will evaluate the long-term impacts of a previous study, in which tax collectors were randomly assigned to receive performance pay for two years based on revenue collection, audits, and/or subjective ratings. This performance pay ended two years ago, and the current study will determine whether this past period of performance pay had a persistent effect on tax collection' information that can help design the optimal duration for and interval between such schemes. The final study will analyze the impact of individual inspectors' characteristics on revenues by using the overlap of different collectors in the same region to separate individual from regional effects.

旨在提高税收遵从性的机制的有效性的实验证据-摘要低税收收入大大限制了政府提供基本公共服务的能力。尽管这一问题很严重，但很少有系统地尝试设计和评价可行的、可扩展的方法来加强税收和公共部门的业绩。通过四项相关但不同的研究，本项目将填补这一空白，审查奖励政策对公务员业绩的影响，以及公民参与和税务人员的能力对税收的作用。鉴于这些问题的极端重要性以及研究人员与决策者伙伴关系的内在和持续性质，研究结果将为世界各地的广大决策者提供增加税收的实际指导。虽然在法定税收的最佳设计方面已经做了大量工作（例如，Pomeranz 2014，Kleven and Waseem 2013），在给定的税收制度中，对增加收入和执法的关注较少。该项目旨在探讨导致城市财产税征收率低的执法和遵守问题，并审查旨在解决这些问题的计划的有效性。该项目由四项研究组成。第一个是一个新的随机试验，解决税收士气和公民纳税的意愿。这一部分力求通过了解纳税人的服务偏好并与当地政府分享这一信息，加强纳税与提供服务之间的联系。地方政府将被随机分配，要么接受这种偏好诱导的信息，要么不接受，而那些接受信息的地方政府将被随机分配，根据纳税人的偏好分配一部分预算，或者正常支出。跟踪收入，分配，服务提供和公民的信念将提供一个干净的经验估计这些计划对纳税人的态度和实际收入的影响。接下来的两项研究重点是激励税务人员的表现。在第二项研究中，税务人员被随机分配到竞争更好的工作岗位，根据他们的表现，这是衡量的增加回收或税基。这种设计允许对这些非财务激励措施对收入和收集者行为的影响进行干净的测试，这将在本项目的过程中进行分析。第三项研究将评估以前一项研究的长期影响，在这项研究中，税务人员被随机分配接受基于税收、审计和/或主观评级的两年绩效工资。这种绩效工资在两年前结束，目前的研究将确定过去的绩效工资是否对税收信息产生了持续影响，这有助于设计这种计划的最佳持续时间和间隔。最后一项研究将利用同一地区不同收集者的重叠情况来分析个别检查员的特征对收入的影响，以区分个人和地区的影响。