Jeff Hoopes is an associate professor and the Harold Q. Langenderfer Scholar of Accounting at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. Hoopes focuses on understanding how taxpayers respond to tax laws and changes in tax enforcement and uses his expertise to explain why. His work emphasizes the intersection of tax law, accounting, public economics, and finance.

In a world where we seem to know more and understand less every day, Professor Hoopes goes to the proverbial videotape to find answers. He works with the Internal Revenue Service to analyze actual tax return data to see how much of what we think we know squares with reality—and what he finds may surprise you. Hoopes and Dean talk about how to achieve the high tax compliance rates that everyone wants but nobody seems able to deliver.

This episode also features a recording by one of our students, Nicholas from New York, NY, reading a quote from Charles Dickens about the window tax, a tax that was intended as a tax on the ownership of luxury homes but prompted the landlords of tenement buildings to board up windows and build new ones without windows. 

Resources:

1. Professor Hoopes’s UNC biography.
2. His personal website.
3. Link to “Is Tax Planning Best Done In Private?”
4. Daniel Shaviro’s blog post about Hoopes’s visit to the NYU Law Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium.
5. The Pencil Question article: Edward J. Mccaffery, "The Holy Grail of Tax Simplification", 1990 Wisconsin Law Review
6. The student-read Dickens quote can be found here.