Sagit Leviner (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) presents A New Era of Tax Enforcement – From "Big Stick" to Responsive Regulation at Haifa University in Israel today as part of its Faculty Workshop Series.  Here is the abstract:

Recent developments in regulation and tax administration in Australia inspired this article on tax compliance and responsive regulation, a concept Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite developed and the Australian tax administration implemented, as an alternative approach to enforcement. The Article begins with a discussion on what has become the dominant approach to tax enforcement of the past three and a half decades: the economics of crime and compliance. It evaluates the key advantages and disadvantages of the economic approach as well as its application to tax. Next, the Article explores responsive regulation as a method that draws on the economic paradigm but that also supplements this approach with other theories, particularly those involving identity, conflict escalation, and procedural justice. The Article suggests that this broader, more balanced, and closely tailored method of regulating responsively may enable regulators to draw on the advantages of the economic model while alleviating some of its drawbacks and that it may therefore constitute a superior method for regulating compliance.