Following up on last month’s post, IRS Cancels 2011 Research Conference Due to Budget Cuts:

The IRS is pleased to announce that it will co-host a one-day research conference in June with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC). It will be different from prior IRS research conferences in several key respects:

• It will last just one day and therefore will include fewer research papers. There will be four sessions: The Impact of Service on Compliance; Individual Compliance Behavior; Estimating the Tax Gap; and Large Business and Nonprofit Behavior. Presenters and discussants will include IRS and academic researchers, as well as private consultants.
• It will also be able to accommodate fewer people. However, the TPC will be able to stream the conference to the Internet, where the videos will also be stored for later viewing.
• Online viewers will be able to see the video feed of the conference as well as the PowerPoints in a split screen and will be able to e-mail questions to each session for the Q&A time following the presentations.
• The presenters’ PowerPoint slides will not be distributed in paper form, even to those who attend the conference. Interested people should download them instead from the TPC’s event page; we plan to have them ready for download 2-3 days prior to the conference.

There will be no charge for the conference, but non-IRS attendees will be limited to the first 75 who register at the TPC event website, beginning on June 1. Given limited seating, we strongly recommend agencies to encourage employees to attend online. We look forward to a wide spectrum of attendees from the government, academic, and private sector.