One of the IRS’s principal goals is to maximize voluntary compliance. Yet, there is often a great deal of confusion and consternation when taxpayers discover that the IRS refers to the annual filing and payment ritual as “voluntary;” especially since most taxpayers do not believe they have...

This paper proposes a new typology and framework for tax compliance systems. Traditionally-competing approaches such as deterrence theory, behaviorist theory, and game theoretic models taken together suggest that tax compliance is perhaps a new type of system — a “wicked system” — that...

Do audits affect individual tax compliance? This question is not new and multiple answers have been attempted over the past four decades. Those who have made such attempts have suffered from the impediment of an inability to test their theories against known, or even approximated, rates of...

For over 40 years theorists have sought the effects of tax audits on voluntary compliance rates by studying individual taxpayer motivations. Yet no single theory has produced a taxpayer incentive model that both comports with experience and explains the effects of audits on compliance. This...

The IRS's audit enforcement policy is based on the principle that audits deter taxpayers from cheating and therefore increase voluntary tax compliance. For more than forty years, however, there has been considerable debate over whether higher audit rates actually contribute to increased...

The probabilities associated with a tax return being audited or containing underreported tax are formulated here in a different way. This new formulation is mathematically equivalent to the traditional formulation; however, it reveals a trigonometric relationship between these probabilities that...

The classic deterrence theory model of income tax evasion first articulated in 1972 has met significant criticism because it does not comport with the observed rate of tax compliance. This article argues that the classic expected utility model and its various progeny, including nonexpected...