In her testimony before Congress, Nina Olson, the National Taxpayer Advocate, said the following regarding the impact of noncompliance on taxpayers, in general:
“If we divide the 2001 net tax gap estimate of $255 billion by 130 million individual taxpayers, we can see that each of those taxpayers in 2001 paid, on average, an extra $2,000 to subsidize the unwillingness or inability of some taxpayers to pay their fair share.”
In 2001 the average taxpayer paid $8,265 in taxes. With an estimated tax gap – which is the difference between what taxpayers should pay and what they actually pay on a timely basis – of $345 billion, this means that the 130 million taxpayers paid on average $2,649 more in taxes to subsidize the unwillingness or inability of some taxpayers to pay their fair share.
In other words, if everyone paid the taxes they owed, average individual income taxes paid per taxpayer could have been 32.1 percent less.
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