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Will Indiana's Tax Amnesty Program Do Any Good?

By Alexander McCall

Posted June 30, 2015

Businesses and Indiana residents who have unpaid taxes will have a month to pay up without repercussion. The governor announced Monday a Sept. 15 start date to the state's month-long tax amnesty program - an effort state officials are hoping will bring in millions of dollars.

Indiana's 2005 amnesty program raked in close to $250 million, but the state isn't expecting to collect that amount this time around.

Justin Ross, a professor in the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, says tax amnesty programs are mostly benign, but they aren't particularly effective at collecting large amounts of back taxes.

More troublingly, it can teach people how to evade the system.

"One of the unique things about American taxpayers is we're generally a pretty compliant bunch," Ross says. "There are documented cases where some taxpayers learned through the amnesty just how easy it was to evade and then never came back."

And he says collection figures are often overstated, despite the large dollar amounts.

"Even if you took the numbers at face value, you're looking at something that's in the range of 1–3 percent of general fund revenues," he says.

The first $84 million collected is supposed to fund the governor's Regional Cities Initiative, and the following $6 million is designated for the Indiana Department of Transportation and the Hoosier State Rail Line.

Ross says using amnesty funds for special projects seems like a no-no.

"I don't see the amnesties states run as generally good practice when they're just trying to find a way to fund some special program," Ross says. "If it's important enough to do with amnesty revenues, it should have been important enough to do with general funding."

He says amnesties are most beneficial when they help states collect outstanding revenues that might otherwise be very expensive to collect and bring taxpayers who have managed to remain outside the state's tax rolls into the tax system.

The programs can be compelling for businesses, especially out-of-state businesses, which Ross says are often the source of most of the money is collected. He says 47 percent of the collections in Indiana's last amnesty programs came from out of state.

"Particularly with out-of-state businesses, it's difficult sometimes to figure out where you owe money," Ross says. "These places, they think they might owe Indiana some money, but they're hesitant to really investigate it until they have these kind of amnesty programs. They can use that to kind of go through and figure out what the rules are."

The 2015 tax amnesty program will begin Sept. 15 and end Nov. 16.

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