The current study was designed to investigate U.S. taxpayers' perception of the severity of tax evasion relative to other offences in general and white-collar crimes in particular. We compared the perception of tax evasion to twenty other offences, including violent crimes such as rape and murder and relatively minor offences such as jaywalking. Due to the recent focus by lawmakers and the media on white-collar scandals and the lack of comparisons in prior literature, we also included six white-collar crimes. Overall, the results indicate that tax evasion was viewed as only somewhat serious. When comparing tax evasion to other white-collar offences, we found that tax evasion was perceived as equal in severity to minimum wage law violations and rated less serious than the other four white-collar crimes investigated. Most demographic factors (age, gender, education or income level, political affiliation, etc.) did not seem to be related to perceptions of tax evasion. However, location of taxpayers did have some effect. These findings differ from several previous studies.2
How do taxpayers respond cognitively to add-on sales taxes versus all-inclusive excise taxes? If structural variations produce cognitive differences, then do the differences affect buying behavior? These are important questions because consumer spending drives the U.S. economy and directly determines the amount of tax revenues collected from consumption taxes.
If the negative opinion that people have about taxes (Tax Foundation 2009) increases the saliency of the tax, then an add-on sales tax might decrease consumer spending more than an all-inclusive excise tax pricing structure. Instead, results suggest that demand is higher when the add-on component is a sales tax as compared to an excise tax that is embedded into the total price. The effects on demand are even more pronounced and people recall lower prices when the add-on sales tax is presented as a percentage of the base price—as is generally the case in the U.S.—rather than as an additional currency component.
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This paper provides a review of the literature on the role of the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program in accounting education. The consensus is that the VITA program affords students an experiential learning opportunity to enhance their academic experience with real-life work exposure. However, there also seems to be a sense of underutilization of VITA as a service learning activity. Underlying that sentiment, somewhat, is the lack of an ongoing, constructive discourse on current practices. These observations provided us the impetus to develop and administer a cross-sectional survey investigating the structure of VITA programs in accounting education in the U.S. We utilize a non-sampling research design in that we reach out to the entire population of accounting programs in the U.S. The study includes an analysis of active VITA programs, an investigation into the demise of discontinued programs, and descriptive information on institutions that have never offered a program. Our goal is to energize VITA program activity in accounting education and promote future discussion and research about the program. We contribute to the literature by providing the first comprehensive literature review of VITA programs in accounting education coupled with a data-driven description of the current status of VITA.
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