نبذة مختصرة : The existence of a private cost borne by audited taxpayers a�ects the tax enforcement policy. This is so because tax auditors will face now two sources of uncertainty, namely, the typical one associated with taxpayers ’ income and that associated with the taxpayers ’ idiosyncratic attitude towards tax compliance. Moreover, the inspection policy can be exposed to some randomness from the taxpayers ’ viewpoint due to the uncertainty about the audit cost borne by the tax authority. In this paper we provide an unified framework to analyze the e�ects of all these sources of uncertainty in a model of tax compliance with strategic interaction between auditors and taxpayers. We show that more variance in the distribution of the taxpayers ’ private cost of evading raises both tax compliance and the ex-ante welfare of taxpayers. The e�ects of the uncertainty about the audit cost faced by the tax authority are generally ambiguous. We also discuss the implications of our model for the regressive (or progressive) bias of the e�ective tax system. This paper has benefited from comments made by participants in the Encuentro de Economia Pública (Santa Cruz de Tenerife) and by two anonymous referees of this Journal. Of course, they should not bear any responsibility for the remaining errors. Financial support from the Institute of
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