Tax enforcement and the intended and unintended consequences of information disclosure

Abstract

We quantify the intended and unintended consequences to firms of increasing tax information disclosure to the IRS. Our empirical strategy leverages an exogenously staggered adoption of a redesigned federal U.S. tax form. We find that the redesign achieved the intended consequence of increasing compliance after 2011 among some firms. At the same time, we find the unintended consequence that firms changed their reporting in a way that decreased expected tax liability. We estimate that this unintended behavior reduced corporate receipts by $1.2 billion.