In 1969, Shoup postulated that the presence of interrelated taxes in a tax system would reinforce the tax penalty system ("self-reinforcing penalty system of taxes"). In this paper, we have tried to formally develop this idea. We find that in order for tax reinforcement to be maintained, it is necessary for interrelated taxes to be administered by a single tax administration, or if they are administered by different tax administrations, the level of collaboration between them has to be sufficiently high. If so, tax evasion in interrelated taxes might be considered as an alternative explanation for the gap between the levels of tax evasion that can be guessed in practice and the much higher levels predicted by the classical tax evasion theory (Allingham and Sandmo, 1972; Yitzhaki, 1974). Otherwise, the result anticipated by Shoup may even be reversed. Moreover, as long as collaboration is imperfect, the classical results of the comparative statics might change, since in some cases, although global tax compliance increases when faced with a variation in a tax parameter, it can decrease in a single tax.
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Paper provided by Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB) in its series Working Papers with number
2004/2.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
James Andreoni & Brian Erard & Jonathan Feinstein, 1998.
"Tax Compliance,"
Journal of Economic Literature,
American Economic Association, vol. 36(2), pages 818-860, June.
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