Do Individuals Comply on Income Not Reported by Their Employer

Individuals (e.g., the self-employed and those earning casual wages such as tips) with income not reported to the tax authority by a third party may be less likely to be detected evading taxes relative to the case in which their income is subject to third-party reporting. However, their compliance responses - to changes in the proportion of income that is reported to the tax authority, to changes in audit and tax rates, and so on - are largely unknown, in part because of the difficulty in obtaining information on individual choices in these situations. We use experimental methods to examine individual income tax compliance in settings where individuals differ in the portion of their income that is "matched" (or reported to the tax authority via third-party information) versus "nonmatched" (or not fully reported to the tax authority). Our results indicate that individuals who have relatively more non-matched income exhibit significantly lower tax compliance rates than individuals who earn relatively less non-matched income. Our results also indicate that higher income levels, higher tax rates, and lower audit rates lead to increased tax evasion, but with responses that vary depending upon the proportion of matched versus non-matched income. Working Paper 07-3

An Evasion and Counter-Evasion Study in Malicious Websites Detection

Malicious websites are a major cyber attack vector, and effective detection of them is an important cyber defense task. The main defense paradigm in this regard is that the defender uses some kind of machine learning algorithms to train a detection model, which is then used to classify websites in question. Unlike other settings, the following issue is inherent to the problem of malicious websites detection: the attacker essentially has access to the same data that the defender uses to train its detection models. This 'symmetry' can be exploited by the attacker, at least in principle, to evade the defender's detection models. In this paper, we present a framework for characterizing the evasion and counter-evasion interactions between the attacker and the defender, where the attacker attempts to evade the defender's detection models by taking advantage of this symmetry. Within this framework, we show that an adaptive attacker can make malicious websites evade powerful detection models, but proactive training can be an effective counter-evasion defense mechanism. The framework is geared toward the popular detection model of decision tree, but can be adapted to accommodate other classifiers

Security Evaluation of Support Vector Machines in Adversarial Environments

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are among the most popular classification techniques adopted in security applications like malware detection, intrusion detection, and spam filtering. However, if SVMs are to be incorporated in real-world security systems, they must be able to cope with attack patterns that can either mislead the learning algorithm (poisoning), evade detection (evasion), or gain information about their internal parameters (privacy breaches). The main contributions of this chapter are twofold. First, we introduce a formal general framework for the empirical evaluation of the security of machine-learning systems. Second, according to our framework, we demonstrate the feasibility of evasion, poisoning and privacy attacks against SVMs in real-world security problems. For each attack technique, we evaluate its impact and discuss whether (and how) it can be countered through an adversary-aware design of SVMs. Our experiments are easily reproducible thanks to open-source code that we have made available, together with all the employed datasets, on a public repository.Comment: 47 pages, 9 figures; chapter accepted into book 'Support Vector Machine Applications

The state and the tax evasion

State is one of human construction, in need of resources for services offered, to finance the costs of public services available. Increasing the cost of services provided has the effect of increased taxation. Tax evasion is a condemnable act. It is not possible a combination of legal proceedings to obtain maximum benefits, but is reprehensible act, aware of the harm of others. Tax evasion have 2 facets: a lawful and an unlawful, or tax fraud. In our opinion, law does not allow evasion but rather helps the subject to tax in not reaching the area of tax evasion.tax evasion, tax system, Community Aquis, tax audit

Tax Morale, Tax Evasion, and the Shadow Economy

Under which conditions is moral justification of taxation possible? This question does not only interest philosophers and economists from a scientific point of view, but can have considerable practical relevance as well because the willingness of citizens to pay taxes may depend upon whether they consider taxation to be morally justified or not. We first consider theoretical arguments on the role of tax morale, and when tax evasion might be considered as justified by citizens or not. Then we ask how tax morale can be measured. Next, we discuss the role of tax morale for the shadow economy, before determinants of tax morale and empirical results for the impact of tax morale on tax compliance are discussed. For a high tax morale, institutional and cultural factors are at least as important as economic incentives.Tax morale, tax evasion, principles of taxation, trust, direct democracy, federalism

Old George Orwell Got it Backward: Some Thoughts on Behavioral Tax Economics

It is entirely appropriate that the study of public finance take seriously “behavioral” inconsistencies with traditional models of individual and collective decision-making. This raises the question of whether the state should play a role in protecting individuals from themselves, and whether individuals are susceptible to manipulation, or even exploitation, by the people who comprise the state. In this essay I address one aspect of this issue – how it affects an economic analysis of tax systems. In addressing this task I ask, and offer some tentative answers to, what is distinctive about behavioral tax economics as a sub-field of behavioral economics and as a sub-field of tax economics.complexity, compliance