Do Collateral Sanctions Work? Evidence from the IRS' Passport Certification and Revocation Process / Paul R. Organ, Alex Ruda, Joel Slemrod, Alex Turk.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Organ, Paul R.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Ruda, Alex.

Slemrod, Joel.

Turk, Alex.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w29029.

NBER working paper series no. w29029

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

Penalties for tax evasion are typically financial, but many jurisdictions also utilize collateral sanctions that deny access to some government-provided service. To learn about the effectiveness of such penalties, we examine a U.S. policy restricting passport access for taxpayers with substantial tax debt, known as "certification." We find an immediate and strong positive effect on compliance actions when a passport request is denied. We then take advantage of randomization during the policy rollout to identify the direct compliance effect of certification, and find smaller but non-trivial effects whose heterogeneity is consistent with measures of taxpayers' value of having a passport.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2021.