Leading Tax Expert on the Perplexing Tax Gap
INTERVIEW ON THE PRICE OF BUSINESS SHOW, MEDIA PARTNER OF THIS SITE.
Recently Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business Show, interviewed Alex Brill.
The tax gap refers to the difference between the amount of tax that’s owed and the amount that actually gets collected to the government on time. In other words, it’s the money lost due to tax evasion and avoidance, not to mention a complex tax code with a 10,000 “sections” all designed for tax mitigation.
There are two main ways to measure the tax gap:
- Gross tax gap: This is the total difference between what people owe and what they pay on time.
- Net tax gap: This subtracts late payments and money recovered by the IRS from the gross tax gap to show the amount of tax revenue permanently lost.
The IRS estimates that the gross tax gap is in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year, with a significant portion coming from underreported income on tax returns.
Price and Brill look at both Republican and Democrat efforts to address this.
According to the American Enterprise Institute, “Alex Brill is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies the impact of tax policy on the US economy as well as the fiscal, economic, and political consequences of tax, budget, health care, retirement security, and trade policies. He is the editor of Carbon Tax Policy: A Conservative Dialogue on Pro-Growth Opportunities. Before joining AEI, Brill served as the policy director and chief economist of the House Ways and Means Committee. Previously, he served on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He has served on the staff of the President’s Fiscal Commission (Simpson-Bowles) and the Republican Platform Committee (2008). He is also the founder and CEO of the economic consulting firm Matrix Global Advisors (MGA). Brill has an MA in mathematical finance from Boston University and a BA in economics from Tufts University.”
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LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW IN ITS ENTIRETY HERE
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