Use Tax Awareness and Compliance: A Survey Analysis
8 Pages Posted: 26 Jul 2012
Date Written: July 23, 2012
Abstract
This report applies statistical analysis to a non-scientific survey of attitudes toward the use tax among Californian taxpayers. There are three noteworthy conclusions. First, making consumers aware of their legal obligation to remit use tax increases the probability of compliance. Second, higher-income earners are just as likely to evade use tax as lower income earners, holding out-of-state spending constant, which suggests that evasion reduces the regressive incidence of sales and use taxes. Third, evaders are more likely to continue evading even when they are afforded the option to earmark their taxes toward specific causes; however, some causes appear to motivate more compliance than others.
Keywords: use tax, e-commerce, tax evasion, survey
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