Enforcement, Socio-Economic Diversity, and Tax Filing Compliance in the United States

James Alm (), Jeremy Clark and Kara Leibel ()
Additional contact information
Kara Leibel: Office of Research, Internal Revenue Service

No 1514, Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we examine the determinants of tax filing compliance in the United States. We use county-level data on non-filing rates for the tax year 2000, obtained directly from the Internal Revenue Service. We include explanatory variables identified in the "rational compliance" framework, including an enforcement index against identified non-filers, the audit rate of filers, and the average penalty rate for both filers and non-filers. We also examine the role of socio-economic diversity on tax compliance, testing whether within-county heterogeneity in household income, language, race, and religion can help explain variation in non-filing rates. We find that non-filing is increasing with heterogeneity by race, though not by income or language, and that non-filing is decreasing with heterogeneity by religious membership. As for enforcement variables, we find that non-filing rates tend to fall with the enforcement index. Other variables have somewhat mixed results.

Keywords: tax evasion; social capital; diversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H2 H26 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-iue, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul1514.pdf First Version, April 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Enforcement, Socioeconomic Diversity, and Tax Filing Compliance in the United States (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tul:wpaper:1514

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kerui Geng ().