The level of taxpayer compliance has steadily decreased over the years. Individual taxpayers failed to report approximately $100 billion in federal taxes due on legal income received in 1989. The compliance gap is large enough to greatly reduce the federal government deficit. Studies employing psychological cognitive structure approaches to analyzing taxpayer compliance and attempting to increase taxpayer compliance employ theories related to equity sensitivity, attitude formation, and change. These studies generally examine relationships between compliance and socioeconomic and situational variables. Appeals to a taxpayer's moral obligation to pay taxes have been studied as a means to change taxpayer attitudes and intentions and thereby increase compliance. The present study sought to determine if taxpayer compliance could be enhanced by sanction threats or by appeals to conscience. The study also endeavored to discover if compliance differed between various types of taxpayers. These individual differences were posited to cause taxpayers to react differently to alternative types of interventions aimed at increasing compliance to income tax law. A laboratory study was designed to gauge a subject's sensitivity to equity, administer intervention techniques, and measure compliance and attitude toward taxation. The data were analyzed using Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA). Although the results of the study showed no significant main effect for treatment type, a significant main effect (p = .0075) was found for Equity Sensitivity type when the scenario depicting Overstating Business Expenses was the dependent variable in the design. There were no significant main effects for Equity Sensitivity type or treatment type when the six attitude items were used as the dependent variables in a MANOVA. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect tax complexity has on taxpayers' understanding of the tax law. The individual income tax system in the United States is based on self assessment by the taxpayer. A self assessing system requires a high level of voluntary compliance by the participants. Taxpayers who file returns on time and file correctly are considered to be in compliance with the tax law. A taxpayer who cannot understand the rules for tax reporting logically does not have the ability to comply with the law. A tax system predicated on the presumption that the average taxpayer can understand and comply with the tax rules must not become so complex that the taxpayer is forced into either seeking external help or not fully complying. The question arises, does complexity affect the ability of taxpayers to understand, and thus comply with, the tax system?

This research explores the impact of complexity in federal income tax laws on taxpayer compliance. The primary research question is: Is complexity in the tax law associated with noncompliance? The research is unique in that previous work has not yet demonstrated an a priori circumstance in which taxpayers do not comply with the law when compliance would be in their economic self-interest. "Economic self-interest" is narrowly construed in this study, being defined as an individual's utility for saving tax dollars. "Complexity" is operationalized by the system of nonresident taxation. A situation is investigated wherein a set of taxpayers do not comply, when there is complexity in the tax law, even though compliance would reduce their tax liability. Examining compliance in this setting renders it unlikely that the confound opportunity to evade is related to observed noncompliance. The results indicate complexity is the key explanatory variable for noncompliance found in this study. / Ph. D.

The federal income tax system in the United States depends upon a high degree of voluntary compliance. The IRS estimates that the voluntary compliance level is declining and that this tax compliance gap cost the government an estimated $90.5 billion in 1981. Between 1979 and 1982, Congress made several changes in the tax laws designed to improve tax compliance. Extensive data was collected by the IRS for 1979 and 1982 through the random sample audits of approximately 50,000 taxpayers on the Taxpayer Compliance Measurement Program (TCMP), which is conducted every three years. During the period 1979 through 1982, Congress lowered the marginal tax rates, added some fairly severe penalties, for both taxpayers and paid return preparers, and increased information reporting requirements for certain types of income. In this research, it was hypothesized that voluntary compliance should increase in response to lower marginal rates, a higher risk of detection due to additional reporting requirements, and increased penalties. Multiple regression analysis was employed to test these hypotheses, using 1979 and 1982 TCMP data. Because of the requirements for taxpayer confidentiality, it was necessary for the IRS to run the data and provide the aggregate data results for the research. The results provided insight into the effectiveness of tax compliance legislation. While the overall voluntary compliance level (VCL) increased from 1979 to 1982 by 1.53 per cent, the VCL increase for taxpayers in high marginal rates was much smaller (.42 percent) than the overall increase. This is very inconsistent with the notion that high marginal rates are driving noncompliance, and suggests that marginal rates may not be strong determinants of compliance. Probably other factors, such as opportunity for evasion, may be more important. There was little change from 1979 to 1982 of the compliance of returns done by paid return preparers. Because of the timing of many TEFRA provisions (effective in 1983), further research for years after 1982 is needed.

Tax evasion is a serious issue that influences governmental revenues, IRS enforcement strategies, and tax policy decisions. While audits are the most effective method of enforcing compliance, they are expensive to conduct and the IRS is only able to audit a fraction of the returns filed each year. This suggests that audits alone are not sufficient to curb the billions of dollars of tax evaded by taxpayers each year and that a better understanding of factors influencing compliance decisions is needed to enable policymakers to craft tax policies that maximize voluntary compliance. Prior research tends to model compliance as economic, environmental, or personal decisions; however, this study models it as a multifaceted decision where these three perspective individually and interactively influence compliance. It is the first to decompose perceived detection risk into two dimensions (selection risk and enforcement risk) and investigates how these two dimensions of risk, decision domains (refund or tax due positions), and three personal factors (mental accounting, narcissism, and proactivity) influence taxpayers’ compliance decisions. I conducted a 2x2 fully crossed experiment involving 331 self-employed taxpayers. These taxpayers have opportunities to evade that employed taxpayers do not. For example, they can earn cash income that is not reported to the IRS by third parties. For self-employed taxpayers (especially those wanting to evade), perceived selection and enforcement risks may be distinctly different depending on a taxpayer’s situation, what they believe they can control, and what risk they are willing to accept. For example, selection risk may be perceived as the greatest risk for those with unreported items on their return, while enforcement risk may be more prominent for those perceiving certain levels of selection risk. Thus, I believe self-employed taxpayers are the most appropriate population to sample from and are likely have reasonable variation in the three personal factors of interest. I find that taxpayers do differentiate between selection and enforcement risks but the difference only manifests for taxpayers in certain decision domains. Taxpayers in a refund position (i.e. conservative mindset) had a greater sensitivity to the form of payment (cash vs. check) and appeared to use this information to make inferences about enforcement risk which was significantly different from their perceptions of selection risk. Conversely, tax due taxpayers (i.e. aggressive mindset) appeared to overlook the form of payment and did not assess these two risks as significantly different. Evaluating the full sample suggests that both selection risk and enforcement risk have a positive influence on compliance. Further, these risks interact to influence compliance. Specifically, compliance is greatest when taxpayers perceive a high likelihood of being selected for an audit and enforcement risk only matters when selection risk is low. This finding is interesting and suggests that avoiding interaction with the IRS is a primary objective of taxpayers. In line with my findings of taxpayers perceiving different risks in refund and tax due positions, the influence of risk perceptions on compliance differed for taxpayers in these positions. Refund taxpayers were influenced by both selection and enforcement risk, similar to the full model; however, tax due taxpayers were only influenced by selection risk and appeared to completely overlook enforcement risk when making their reporting decision. Lastly, the study shows that personal characteristics can also influence compliance in the presence of economic and environmental determinants, but some characteristics only manifest in specific decision domains. Of the three personal characteristics investigated, only mental accounting orientation was a significant predictor for the full sample. When the sample was split by decision domain, only proactivity was a predictor of compliance for refund taxpayers, while only mental accounting orientation was a predictor of compliance for due taxpayers. While I did not find results for narcissism and compliance, my subsequent analysis suggests that individual dimensions of narcissism may be better predictors of compliance than the full measure. Specifically, the exploitation dimension was a significant predictor of compliance for those in a tax due position. This study make several contributions to the accounting and tax literatures. First, this study provides support for a two-construct conceptualization for perceived detection risk that includes both selection and enforcement risks. Second, it answers calls to investigate more comprehensive compliance models and finds economic, environmental, and personal characteristics individually and interactively influence compliance. Third, this study investigates three personal factors that have not been investigated in the tax compliance literature. Finally, this study answers calls for research on self-employed taxpayers and suggests that the IRS will be more successful in increasing compliance by playing on taxpayers’ aversion to being selected for an examination than communicating information on the IRS’ ability to detect noncompliance during an examination.