Does It Matter Who Writes the Check to the Government? The Economics of Tax Remittance

This paper argues that who remits tax may be an important aspect of implementing a tax system, in spite of standard economic analysis that maintains that which side of a taxed market remits is completely irrelevant. The irrelevance proposition does not apply in the presence of avoidance and evasion (i.e., in all real tax systems) because the total resource costs of administering a given effective tax structure may vary depending on the remittance system and because the opportunities for avoidance and evasion and the technology of enforcement affect the incentive to demand and supply the taxed activity.