Racial Disparity in Tax Audits? A Chat with Evelyn Smith and Hadi Elzayn about their study "Measuring and Mitigating Racial Disparities in Tax Audits"
Tax Chats
English - February 15, 2023 19:00 - 36 minutes - 24.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 36 ratingsBusiness tax politics biden tax reform bernie elizabeth warren economics business accounting Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Previous Episode: Chatting about President Biden's 2023 State of the Union Address
Scott and Jeff chat with Evelyn Smith and Hadi Elzayn, two of the seven coauthors on a recent working paper entitled "Measuring and Mitigating Racial Disparities in Tax Audits."
We ask them details about the paper. We find that the unconditional audit disparity between (estimated) black tax payers and (estimated) non-black taxpayers is about 5%. We ask about the conditional disparity. The authors explain that conditional on some factors the disparity remains. We discuss what constitutes an audit (a letter in this case). We ask whether the IRS should care about collecting the most amount of revenue, or whether the IRS should care about deterring non-compliance.