In 2010, Utah taxpayers’ spent over $1.3 billion relating to criminal justice in areas of police, courts, and corrections. This $470 per capita expense is an important and necessary component of public safety cost and is below what other states spend on a per capita level. Nonetheless, with shrinking budgets in the face of slow economic growth, Utah policy makers must be increasingly diligent w...

Through the Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare and other efforts, policy makers have begun to redesign Medicare to meet long-term challenges that include an aging population, rising per capita health care costs, and an inadequate benefit package. However, no proposal as of yet fully addresses Medicare's financing needs. Without any changes, revenues from taxpayers to the program ...

This paper analyzes the effect of a change in lump-sum (private) income on the tax and expenditure decisions of a government constrained by taxpayers’ behavioral responses to the tax policy. Lump-sum changes of private income are generally characterized as pure income effects on taxpayers’ behavior, and usually considered in public finance theory as imposing no price effects on the economy. In ...

In the traditional deterrence approach, taxpayers were considered as purely self-interested rational agents (Allingham & Sandmo 1972), and consequently, compliance was enforced by measures such as audits and sanctions. In the late nineties, a new method of regulation was proposed. This approach, the responsive regulation (Ayres & Braithwaite 1992), integrated the various measures to ensure comp...

Abstract—The reasons that explain different behaviors towards tax obligations in similar countries are not completely understood yet. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and compare the factors that influence tax morale levels in Portugal and Spain. We use data from European Values Study (EVS). Using a sample of 2,652 individuals, a factor analysis was used to extract the underlying d...

Internal Revenue Service data indicate that $4.4 billion in excess EITC was claimed for tax year 1994, largely due to violations of the qualifying child eligibility criteria. I find that the probability of misreporting a child is increasing in the size of the EITC and tax benefit. The estimated effect of the EITC on compliance is statistically significant, but modest in size. Reducing the size ...