NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Randomness in Tax Enforcement

Suzanne Scotchmer, Joel Slemrod

NBER Working Paper No. 2512*
Issued in February 1988
NBER Program(s):   PE

For most parameter values, increased randomness about how much taxable income an auditor would assess leads to higher reported income and more revenue, When reducing randomness is costly, optimality requires some randomness in assessed taxable Income. Even if reducing randomness g costless, taxpayers may prefer some randomness when the increased revenue can be rebated, so that the government a revenue stays fixed. These results do not rely on the presence of a distortion in labor supply.

*Published: Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 38, no. 1 (February 1999): 17-32.

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