Tax Administration

IRS Needs to Strengthen Its Approach for Evaluating the SRFMI Data-Sharing Pilot Program

The State Reverse File Match Initiative (SRFMI) is one of the IRS¿s data-sharing strategies to reduce the estimated $345 billion gross fed. tax gap. SRFMI matches fed. and state taxpayer data to identify noncompliant taxpayers -- individuals and businesses who do not file tax returns or do not report all of their income. IRS's document-matching program has proven to be a highly cost-effective way of identifying underreported income, thereby bringing in billions of dollars of tax revenue while boosting voluntary compliance. Based on concerns about whether IRS is fully using data from state and local gov¿ts. to reduce the tax gap, this report assesses IRS's plan for evaluating the effectiveness of the SRFMI pilot taxpayer data-sharing program.

SB/SE Research has provided ongoing support and consultation and has
conducted some research studies to help develop an approach for evaluating
SRFMI pilot results. For example, SB/SE Research matched Colorado and New
Jersey tax-amnesty data to compare the potential use of resources for SRFMI
cases with non-SRFMI cases and found that state tax-amnesty files cannot be
used to definitively identify federal nonfilers or underreporters and that the data
lacked fields ...