Economics Public Finance Tax compliance Tax auditing Tax evasion Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods Game Theory, Economics, Social and Behav. Sciences H26 Power of incentives Tax administration Macroeconomics/Monetary Economics//Financial Economics Multiple inspectors D82
This paper incorporates the incentives of tax inspectors into an equilibrium model of tax compliance and enforcement when the taxpayers’ true income is private information (‘adverse selection’) and the effort of tax inspectors to verify reported income is unobservable (‘moral hazard’). It characterizes the optimal remuneration for tax inspectors, which is a function of discovered tax evasion, paying particular attention to the determinants of the power of incentives and the curvature of the optimal reward scheme. It is shown that the structure of the optimal reward is increasing, and in general non-linear, in the magnitude of discovered tax evasion. The equilibrium characterized has the features that: taxpayers with higher true income underreport less and tax inspectors’ auditing effort, and hence the probability of detecting tax non-compliance, decreases with reported income.
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Title
Optimal performance reward, tax compliance and enforcement
Creators
Christos Kotsogiannis -
CESIfo Munich Germany
Konstantinos Serfes -
School of Economics, LeBow College of Business Drexel University Philadelphia PA 19104 USA