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Publication

Tax Filing and Take-Up: Experimental Evidence on Tax Preparation Outreach and EITC Participation

Governments and non-profits devote substantial resources to increasing take-up of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) through educational outreach. We study a different approach: policies that encourage tax filing. In a large field experiment, we find that IRS letters about free tax preparation modestly increased filing, with a large share of the new filers claiming the EITC. The results suggest policies that increase filing can be an effective way to increase take-up of taxadministered social benefits, even policies that do not raise awareness or directly target the benefit in other ways.

Author(s)
Jacob Goldin
Tatiana Homonoff
Rizwan Javaid
Brenda Schafer
Publication Date
January, 2021