Why taxpayers do or do not comply with tax laws is emerging as a focal point of scholarly research. Individual taxpayers' perceptions of opportunities and risks associated with cheating influence their patterns of noncompliance with income tax laws. The interpretive limitations of the survey methods that typify past research in this area have underscored the need for experimental approaches capable of more direct testing of causal hypotheses. Dr. Weigel's research addresses this need by embedding the tax compliance task within a larger experimental task that requires tax calculation. In the context of a small business management task, Dr. Weigel rigorously compares a random sample of college students with one of middle-aged, experienced taxpayers, testing the effects that a variety of situational conditions--high or low opportunity to cheat and high or low withholding taxes that create loss or refund situations--have on compliance behavior. In addition, an opportunity for further comparison with a third sample of taxpayers is afforded by his collaboration with scholars in the Netherlands. An important scientific contribution that Dr. Weigel's research makes is not only to examine tax compliance in an experimental context, but, specifically, a context that simulates a real-life tax declaration situation and thus provides a particularly good opportunity to understand the decisionmaking process.
