The Impact of Public Income Tax Return Disclosure on Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion – Insights from an Agent-Based Model

We investigate how public tax return disclosure affects heterogeneous taxpayers’ tax avoidance and evasion decisions when they maximize the sum of private expected utility (in line with Allingham and Sandmo, 1972) and social utility (which rewards behavior conforming to social norms). Taxpayers are located on a small-world network and directly observe their neighbors’ wealth. Depending on what tax information is disclosed (nothing; net income only; both gross and net income), they can infer their neighbors’ behavior with varying precision. Using an agent-based simulation, we find that partial disclosure of tax return information can yield more tax revenue than full disclosure.