Chapter Two
Identification
Learning What Activities on Your Campus Are Potential Tax Issues
“I have met the enemy and they are us.”
—Pogo (from the Pogo comic strip by cartoonist Walt Kelly)
The second step to building your tax compliance program at your university after becoming aware of the many areas of potential tax on campus is Identification. See Exhibit 2.1.
Exhibit 2.1 Six Steps of Tax Compliance: Identification
How do you find these tax gaps on campus? This chapter is going to give you some practical tips and advice on how to seek out and find areas for tax compliance improvement. It will also hopefully lead you to determine who it is on campus that has the knowledge to identify these tax gaps.
Building a tax compliance program means that you only need to have the degree of knowledge necessary to determine who to have on your tax compliance team (in the absence of a tax manager, that is).
The saying, “Compliance breeds compliance,” means that you have educated your campus community to the impact of taxes at your university. This needs to be done more than once a year at tax time. To be effective, it needs to be done continually as tax has a habit of appearing every day on your campus.
The more you look to make improvements in compliance, the more areas you will find. And with that you will have the benefit of making more and more people on your campus aware of situations ...
