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POLICY INSIGHT
BEYOND THE NUMBERS

A Double Standard on Tax Compliance

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan suggested recently that Congress should expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for childless adults and non-custodial parents and fully offset the cost by reducing EITC overpayments.  But he and other House Republicans voted today to permanently extend an expensive small-business tax break without offsetting the cost, such as by requiring any improved compliance in that part of the tax code — where the rates of error and loss to the Treasury far outstrip those for the EITC.  The IRS estimates that a stunning 56 percent of business income that individual returns should have reported went unreported in 2006, the latest year for which these data are available.

These developments highlight an egregious double standard in how lawmakers view tax compliance, depending on whether low-income working families or small businesses are at issue.

During a Ways and Means Committee hearing, Ryan praised the EITC’s proven effectiveness in promoting work and reducing poverty and alluded to his proposal to expand the tiny EITC for childless workers — the lone group that the federal tax code actually taxes into (or deeper into) poverty and a group that needs the EITC’s pro-work income boost and incentives.  Ryan’s proposal to expand the childless workers’ EITC is nearly identical to one from the President, which would seem to make it ripe for bipartisan legislative action.

But Chairman Ryan seemed to suggest the need to generate offsetting savings within the EITC to pay, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, for the EITC change.  To be sure, Congress can and should take important steps to reduce EITC errors, including:  1) providing the IRS more adequate funding for enforcement; 2) giving the IRS the authority to regulate paid tax preparers to ensure they meet basic competency standards (a majority of EITC errors occur on commercially prepared returns); and 3) enacting a battery of measures the Treasury has proposed to reduce EITC errors.  Yet Congress has cut IRS enforcement funding heavily since 2010.  It also has failed to approve the Administration’s request to empower the IRS to take steps to significantly reduce errors by commercial tax preparers.

Further, the Joint Tax Committee is understandably cautious about “scoring” various measures to reduce errors on tax returns, whether they concern the EITC or other parts of the tax code.  The combined scored savings from all known legislative proposals to lower EITC errors fall well short of the costs of expanding the EITC for childless workers.  This raises a concern that lawmakers could propose measures to cut the EITC for honest low-income working families and misleadingly promote them as cutting “fraud, waste and abuse” when that’s not what they would do.  Sadly, some members of Congress have done just that in the past.

The small-business legislation that the House approved today would make permanent a generous tax break (known as “Section 179” expensing) for certain small-business investments.  Business income on individual tax returns is, by far, the largest source of tax non-compliance with, as noted above, an estimated 56 percent of this income unreported in 2006.  This resulted in an estimated tax gap of $122 billion, more than four times the gap due to all individual income tax credits (including the EITC).

A dollar is a dollar, whether it’s spent subsidizing small businesses or supplementing the wages of a low-wage worker striving to get a toehold in the economy.  Policymakers should work to improve compliance throughout the tax code.  And they should stop applying double standards to the effort.

Chuck Marr
Vice President for Federal Tax Policy