The Minnesota Income Tax Compliance Experiment: Replication of the Social Norms Experiment

This research note reports the results of a follow-up experiment conducted to validate an earlier experiment showing that if taxpayers overestimate the prevalence of tax evasion, their voluntary compliance can be increased by informing them about the true rate of cheating. The result confirms that tax compliance is influenced partly by social conformity with perceived social norms against cheating. The experiments were done by the Minnesota Department of Revenue in 1995 and 1996, but only the first experiment has been publicly reported to date (Coleman, 1996).