WASET
	%0 Journal Article
	%A J. T. Manhire
	%D 2018
	%J International Journal of Law and Political Sciences
	%B World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
	%I Open Science Index 142, 2018
	%T Constraints on IRS Control: An Alternative Approach to Tax Gap Analysis
	%U https://publications.waset.org/pdf/10009708
	%V 142
	%X A tax authority wants to take actions it knows will foster
the greatest degree of voluntary taxpayer compliance to reduce the
“tax gap.” This paper suggests that even if a tax authority could attain
a state of complete knowledge, there are constraints on whether and
to what extent such actions would result in reducing the macro-level
tax gap. These limits are not merely a consequence of finite agency
resources. They are inherent in the system itself. To show that this is
one possible interpretation of the tax gap data, the paper formulates
known results in a different way by analyzing tax compliance as a
population with a single covariate. This leads to a standard use of the
logistic map to analyze the dynamics of non-compliance growth or
decay over a sequence of periods. This formulation gives the same
results as the tax gap studies performed over the past fifty years
in the U.S. given the published margins of error. Limitations and
recommendations for future work are discussed, along with some
implications for tax policy.
	%P 1428 - 1438