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Economy | |
IRS Getting Even Creepier, Soliciting (no bid) Behavioral Engineering Experiments | |
2011-09-24 | |
The project involves a three-stage laboratory experiment to explore taxpayers' willingness to accept increased reporting burden in exchange for either earnings or non-transparency of earnings to the authority. The first stage is designed to induce subjects to reveal their tendency to under-report taxable earnings in a voluntary reporting system with random audits and penalties for under-reporting. The second stage tests subjects' willingness to pay for burden reduction when there is no opportunity to under-report earnings. The third stage presents subjects with two alternative regimes. One regime shall have no reporting burden, there shall be no opportunity to misreport. In the alternative regime subjects shall have to track their earning (a burden,) but subjects shall have the opportunity to increase their payoff by misreporting. Using our knowledge from the first two stages about subjects' tendency to under-report, analysis of third stage behavior shall tell us whether the regime choice is an effective mechanism for separating compliant and non-compliant taxpayers. | |
Posted by:Anonymoose |