I was looking for something at work today, and stumbled across a fairly recent article on the NY Times website on whether tax returns should be made public. Written by Anna Bernasek, it has some interesting nuggets from history. I actually didn't know that tax returns had ever been public information in the US. No doubt someone will surprise me by telling me that UK tax returns were public too at some point.

But I was fairly cross at Bernasek mixing up individual tax returns and corporate tax returns. While it was good to reference the key academic work on this subject (Lenter, Slemrod and Shackelford - Public Disclosure of Corporate Tax Return Information: Accounting, Economics, and Legal Perspectives, 56 Nat'l Tax J. 803 (December 2003)), it was just plain wrong to include it in an article that was otherwise about individuals. The privacy concerns that might lead you to conclude that it's inappropriate to disclose individual tax returns do not apply to the same extent to companies.

Not that I'm saying that company tax returns should necessarily be disclosed publicly. It's just that the issues aren't the same.

People who read this post also read:

• Theories of the firm and why we tax them
• Chess and accountancy
• A history of the US tax system, courtesy of TurboTax
• Ritchie on limited liability
• Yet another proposal to make tax returns public

Filed under: Academic research, Other blogs, Taxation with tags anna bernasek, david lenter, douglas shackelford, history, joel slemrod, new york times, tax returns, theory of the firm