ABSTRACT
Tax systems in the United States and other industrialized democracies rely heavily on taxpayer active frameworks for the collection of revenue.1
While the systems do have serious administrative agencies, it is nevertheless the case that the vast majority of tax revenue is received without any direct enforcement action by these authorities. The revenue rules are voluntarily complied with and taxpayers report and pay the tax that they believe they owe. For instance, of the $1,902 billion collected by the Internal Revenue
Service for the United States government in 2001, only $32 billion (1.69 percent) came from direct enforcement actions — audit, delinquency pursuit, forced collections, etc., (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 2004a) And taxpayer active taxes — taxes on personal and corporate income, payroll, retail sales, and selective excises — constitute the overwhelming majority of all taxes collected by federal, state, and local governments in the United States — 87.9 percent of the total in fiscal 1999. (Bureau of the Census, Governments Division, 2004). The taxes levied on real property by state and local governments represent the most significant tax collected through heavy administrative action relative to taxpayer effort. In large measure, the revenue system relies on voluntary compliance, not direct enforcement, to generate revenue according to the distribution of that revenue that was envisioned in the tax law.
