Can Audits Encourage Tax Evasion? An Experimental Assessment

E. Satterthwaite
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引用次数: 5

Abstract

Governments and tax administrators around the world rely on the premise that both random and non-random audits will deter tax evasion. This paper is the first in the tax compliance literature to present experimental evidence collected from U.S. residents that this premise may be, at least in part, wrong. Counter-intuitively, I find that random audits encourage taxpayers to cheat more. Where audits were framed as being “random”, participants increased their levels of evasion in the tax periods immediately following the audit. This effect, however, did not plague audits that were framed for participants as being non-random. When a separate group of participants faced audits in which detected evasion could “flag” a participant for one or more future audits, participants cheated less in the periods immediately following the audit. Overall, average compliance in response to non-random audits systematically and significantly dominated average compliance in response to random audits. This result remained robust to the addition of a series of demographic controls as well as the inclusion of participant and time fixed effects. By revealing strong behavioral responses to the way tax audits are presented, this paper (1) opens important new avenues for experimental and controlled field trial research on audit dynamics, and (2) underscores the potential benefits to tax administrators of being more transparent with taxpayers about the nature of audit selection.
审计会助长逃税行为吗?实验评估
世界各地的政府和税务管理人员都依赖于这样一个前提,即随机和非随机审计都能阻止逃税。这篇论文是税收合规文献中第一个提出从美国居民那里收集的实验证据,证明这个前提可能是错误的,至少部分是错误的。与直觉相反,我发现随机审计鼓励纳税人更多地欺骗。在审计被描述为“随机”的情况下,参与者在审计结束后的纳税期内增加了他们的逃税水平。然而,这种影响并没有影响那些为参与者设定为非随机的审计。当一组单独的参与者面临审计时,发现的逃避行为可以“标记”参与者未来的一次或多次审计,参与者在审计后的一段时间内作弊较少。总体而言,响应非随机审核的平均合规系统地和显著地主导响应随机审核的平均合规。这一结果在加入一系列人口控制因素以及参与者和时间固定效应后仍然是稳健的。通过揭示对税务审计呈现方式的强烈行为反应,本文(1)为审计动态的实验和受控现场试验研究开辟了重要的新途径,(2)强调了税务管理者对纳税人更透明地了解审计选择的性质的潜在好处。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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