Care to provide a link to one of these studies so we can look at how comprehensive their data is and on what they base their conclusions stating that Payne's summary figure of 65 cents impact for dollar of tax collected is too high and not a valid estimate?Read Joel Slemrod's "Which is the Simplest Tax System of Them All" in The Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform.
By the way James Paynes is not the essential source, he wrote the comprehensive review of many studies by many economist with a summary of those findings.He is the source for the "65 cents" claim.
Slemrod, Joel. 1996. Which is the Simplest Tax System of Them All, in The Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform, edited by Henry Aaron and William Gale. Brookings Institution.
Sorry doesn't help your case in the least, the cost of compliance addressed in that Brookings release is the lesser paperwork filing costs and does not in anyway address the more comprehensive work of Payne.
He is the source for the "65 cents" claim.
He did indeed add up the big picture of the relavant partial studies up to '93 and why he is referenced in H&R's The Flat Tax as well as in many works throughout economic circles as a primary authority in that field of study.
from ==> The Flat Tax; Hall & Rabushka, '95:
A comprehensive review of all the studies that attempt to measure the costs associated with the federal income tax appears in James L. Payne, Costly Returns: The Burdens of the U.S. Tax System (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1993). Payne summarizes the estimates of compliance costs that appear in the following studies: Joel Slemrod and Nikki Sorum, "The Compliance Cost of the U.S. Individual Income Tax System," National Tax Journal 37 (December 1984): 462–65; Arthur D. Little, Inc., Development of Methodology for Estimating the Taxpayer Paperwork Burden (Washington, D.C.: Internal Revenue Service, 1988), pp. III–23; James T. Iocozzia and Garrick R. Shear, "Trends in Taxpayer Paperwork Burden," in Internal Revenue Service, Trend Analyses and Related Statistics, 1989 Update (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), p. 56; Annual Reports of the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service; and a variety of other IRS memoranda.