Fiscal Citizenship and Taxpayer Privacy

Should individual tax data be public or confidential? Within the United States, secrecy has been the rule since the Tax Reform Act of 1976. But at three critical junctures—the Civil War, the 1920s, and the 1930s—Congress made individual tax records open for public inspection, and newspapers published the incomes of the billionaires of the time. Today, Finland, Norway, and Sweden all mandate significant transparency for individual tax information. This Essay intervenes in the tax-confidentiality debate by building a new analytical framework of fiscal citizenship. Until now, scholars have focused on compliance—whether disclosure incentivizes honest reporting of income, and if it does, whether compliance gains outweigh the intrusion into a generalized notion of taxpayer privacy. But the choice between confidentiality and transparency implicates more than compliance. It rests on the taxpayers’ dynamic interactions with the fiscal apparatus of a state that aspires to democracy and egalitarianism. This Essay posits that fiscal citizens play the roles of reporters, funders, stakeholders, and policymakers in the tax system. Within these roles, transparency and privacy have distinct valences. Further, the degree to which any taxpayer partakes in each role depends on both their own income and the income inequality within the community structured by federal taxation. Under this taxonomy, the propriety of disclosure falls onto a spectrum, and transparency is more appropriate for ultrawealthy taxpayers in times of high economic inequality. The Essay thus provides insights to help policymakers design public-disclosure regimes that cohere with the norms implicit in our fiscal social contract with the state.