An Empirical Examination of Corporate Tax Noncompliance

This paper was prepared for the conference on Taxing Corporate Income in the 21 Century, jointly sponsored by the Office of Tax Policy Research at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at the University of California, Berkeley, and held in Ann Arbor on May 5 and 6, 2005. We appreciate guidance on data questions from Richard Denesha, Donald Lee, John Miller and Dick Teed. We are grateful for comments on a presentation of preliminary results received from Charles Brown, James Hines, and other members of the University of Michigan public finance workshop, and for comments received at the conference from discussants Joe Bankman and Brian Erard, and several other participants.