Audits, audit effectiveness, and post-audit tax compliance

Sales Tax Compliance and Audit Selection

Literature on tax compliance has experienced explosive growth in the past 20 years. Yet the vast majority of this work has focused on individuals and compliance with the personal income tax, rather than company compliance and compliance with other taxes. This paper explores the subject of sales tax audit selection and firm underreporting of statutory sales tax liabilities. The analysis relies o...

Ambiguity about Audit Probability, Tax Compliance, and Taxpayer Welfare

We show that an increase in uncertainty about the probability of being audited (ambiguity) increases tax compliance for ambiguity-averse taxpayers but reduces compliance for ambiguity lovers. Because experimental evidence reveals considerable heterogeneity with respect to ambiguity preferences, we conclude that fostering uncertainty about the probability of being audited may not be an effective...

An audit of paediatric audits.

An audit of audits at a children's hospital over a six year period showed that 27.8% fulfilled the criteria for a full audit and 22.2% were re-audited. It is recommended that newcomers to audit are given training on audit methodology and that all audit departments should audit their audits annually.

Compliance with Endogenous Audit Probabilities

Audit Uncertainty , Bayesian Updating , and Tax Evasion

We extend the standard, one-period model of tax evasion to an intertemporal framework in which an expected-utility-maximizing taxpayer updates expectations about the probability of a future audit based on past audit experience. This framework provides a theoretical grounding for the empirical evidence indicating that tax evasion is affected by taxpayers' perceptions of audit probabilities and i...