IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jnlpup/v36y2016i03p335-380_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The political economy of tax enforcement: a look at the Internal Revenue Service from 1978 to 2010

Author

Listed:
  • Bagchi, Sutirtha

Abstract

This article looks at whether political ideology matters for enforcement of the nation’s tax laws. An analysis of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) budget and personnel suggests that the party affiliation of the President makes no difference to the overall level of IRS resources. However, there are significant increases in the number of IRS employees devoted to criminal investigation and revenue collection under Democratic administrations. Audits of tax returns filed by corporations, individuals and estates are also significantly more likely under Democratic administrations. The body of evidence points in the direction that while Congress has a greater influence in determining the overall level of resources available to the IRS, the President has a more pronounced influence on the allocation of those resources.

Suggested Citation

  • Bagchi, Sutirtha, 2016. "The political economy of tax enforcement: a look at the Internal Revenue Service from 1978 to 2010," Journal of Public Policy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 36(3), pages 335-380, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jnlpup:v:36:y:2016:i:03:p:335-380_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0143814X1500029X/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christian A. Vossler & Michael McKee, 2017. "Efficient Tax Reporting: The Effects Of Taxpayer Liability Information Services," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 55(2), pages 920-940, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jnlpup:v:36:y:2016:i:03:p:335-380_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/pup .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.