Incentive effects of the IRS’ passport certification and revocation process

Paul R. Organ, Alex Ruda, Joel Slemrod and Alex Turk

Journal of Public Economics, 2022, vol. 208, issue C

Abstract: Traditional penalties for tax noncompliance are financial, but many jurisdictions now also use non-monetary tools, including collateral sanctions that deny access to some government-provided service. To learn about the effectiveness of one such penalty, we examine a recent U.S. policy restricting passport access for taxpayers with substantial tax debt, known as “certification.” We take advantage of a field experiment during the policy rollout, and find small but positive effects on taxpayer compliance of the certification notice sent to eligible taxpayers. We then study a subset of certified taxpayers who were denied a passport-related request, and find an immediate and strong positive effect of the denial on compliance.

Keywords: Tax compliance; Tax enforcement; Collateral sanctions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:208:y:2022:i:c:s0047272722000275

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104625

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