Sixteenth annual IRS-TPC Joint Research Conference on Tax Administration

Thursday, June 25, 2026, 8 a.m.-4:40 p.m.

Urban Institute
500 L’Enfant Plaza, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20024

The Internal Revenue Service and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center will co-sponsor their 16th annual tax administration research conference this year. It will be held on June 25, 2026, at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. For more information about IRS research conferences, including previous conference programs and papers, see IRS Research Conference for links to previous conferences.

Register for the 16th Annual IRS/TPC Joint Research Conference on Tax Administration

Agenda

8-8:30 a.m. — Breakfast/Check-in

8:30-8:45 a.m. — Opening Remarks

• Robert McClelland (Senior Fellow, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center)
• Reza Rashidi (Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Research, Applied Analytics and Statistics (IRS))

8:45-10:15 a.m. — Session 1: Help Me Help You: Nudging Taxpayers Into Compliance

Moderator: Masanue Vah (IRS, RAAS)

• How do IRS Staffing Reductions Impact Individual Income Tax Compliance?
  • Vishal P. Baloria, Todd D. Kravet (University of Connecticut); Jennifer Luchs-Nuñez (Colorado State University)
• From Self-Reporting to System-Reporting: Measuring Compliance Gains from Event-Based Tax Administration
  • Ali Ekman (Oxford University)
• Automating Cross-Border Withholding Tax Compliance: A Validation Framework for Patent Royalty Payments
  • Jiseon Lee (Samsung)

Discussant:

• Michael Udell (IRS, RAAS)

10:15-10:35 a.m. — Break: Poster Session

• What Counts as Identity Theft? Adjustments to Pre-Acceptance Submission Methodology for the IMF Identity Theft Taxonomy
  • Spencer Brien, Kevin Kadowaki (IRS, RAAS)
• The Secure Query Service: A Novel Application for Providing Privacy-Preserving Aggregate Statistics on Individual Income Tax Data
  • Amy O'Hara, Joshua Snoke, Vince Dorie, Jake Pasner (Georgetown University); Mark Xu, Kelly Dauberman, Corbin Miller, Brian Foltz, Caiyi Lang (IRS, RAAS); Ron Borzekowski (Yale University)

10:35 a.m.-12:05 p.m. — Session 2: From Good to Great: Getting the Most Out of Audits

Moderator: Valentina Kachanovskaya (IRS, RAAS)

• A New Approach to Dealing With Imperfect Detection Tax Return Audits:Leave One Out Estimator Income and Self-Employment Tax
  • Ishani Roy, Alex Turk (IRS, RAAS)
• Refresh Rate Matters: Monthly Retraining Improves Audit-SelectionUnder Concept Drift
  • Brandon Anderson, Austin Miller, Nan Xu, Alex Turk (IRS, RAAS)
• Rethinking Post-Audit Compliance Heterogenous and Persistent Effects in Experimental Data
  • Gabriela Mejia-Becerra, Carlos Scartascini (Inter-American Development Bank)

Discussant:

• Brian Erard (B. Erard & Associates LLC)

12:05-12:35 p.m. — Break/Lunch

12:35-1:05 p.m. — Keynote speaker

• Janet Holtzblatt (Tax Policy Center)

1:05-1:20 p.m. — Break

1:15-2:45 p.m. — Session 3: Indirect Impacts of Enforcement Over Time

Moderator: Lori Stuntz (IRS, RAAS)

• Experimental Evidence on the Specific Indirect Effects of Audits
  • Ellen Badgley, Justin Nave, Miguel Sarzosa (MITRE); Thomas Hertz (IRS, RAAS)
• Long-Distance Deterrence Spillovers from High-Intensity Tax Enforcement:
• Social Network Evidence from the 2015 New York City Zapper Crackdown
  • Zizhuo Chen (University of Minnesota Twin Cities)
• The Specific Indirect Effect of IRS's Automated Underreporting (AUR)
• Enforcement
  • Thomas Hertz (IRS, RAAS); Miguel Sarzosa (MITRE)

Discussant:

• William Boning (U.S. Department of the Treasury)

2:50-3:05 p.m. — Break

3:05-4:35 p.m. — Session 4: Making Third-Party Data Work Harder

Moderator: Bizuayehu Bedane (IRS, RAAS)

• Unpacking Box 12: Imputing Deferred Compensation Categories on Population-Level Form W-2 Data Using SOI Transcription and Machine Learning
  • Rachel Geiger, Derek Gutierrez, Victoria Bryant (IRS, RAAS)
• Wage Misreporting on Individual Income Tax Returns: Evidence from W-2 Mismatches
  • William Boning, Lucas Goodman, Emily Lin (U.S. Department of the Treasury)
• Out of Sight, Out of Tax: Strategic Payment Routing and the Limits of Third-Party Reporting
  • Riddha Basu (George Washington University); Ben Lourie, Chengqi Zhu (University of California Irvine)

Discussant:

• Jamie McGuire (Joint Committee on Taxation)

4:35-4:40 p.m. — Wrap-up

Reza Rashidi (Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics (IRS))

Note: Bolded names indicate presenters.

Related

For more information about IRS research conferences, including previous conference programs and papers:

• Tax stats
• IRS Research Conference