Kent readers more apt to cheat on their taxes: Editor’s Note

So, would you ever cheat on your taxes?

We asked that last week, in our reader survey, and the answer to our highly unscientific poll found it went nearly 50/50 (it was actually 48 percent yes and 51 percent no.)

Wow, Kent. The IRS may want to talk to you.

Every year our Infernal Revenue Service puts together a “Taxpayer Attitude Survey.” And part of that little quiz (okay, it’s not so little, at 18 pages) asks if people would be willing to cheat on their taxes.

The latest survey is from 2009 – and it found that 84 percent of taxpayers chose the “not at all,” response, when they were asked if they would be willing to cheat. The exact question was “How much, if any, do you think is an acceptable amount to cheat on your income taxes?”

In addition to the squeaky-clean respondents who said never, 9 percent were happy to toe the waters a little, saying they’d cheat “here and there.”

And 4 percent just picked up the ball and ran with it, saying they’d fudge their numbers “as much as possible.” I’m not sure if the Mob factored into this group.

Of course, it’s not fair to compare the IRS results to those of the Kent Reporter. Our methodology is a little lax, meaning we have no idea if 5 people or 500 bothered with our online survey. The IRS carefully chose 1,000 respondents.

Even so, you can’t help but wonder if Kent Reporter readers like the idea of tax evasion more than the people the IRS asked.

On the other hand, what would YOU do, if someone from the IRS called you and asked if you’d like to take a survey about cheating on your taxes? You’re darned right you’d tell them how important personal integrity is, yada yada yada.

So maybe the Kent Reporter has something going for it that the IRS doesn’t. We don’t care if you cheat, because we can’t do a thing about it.

In the same way we couldn’t do a thing about it when we surveyed our readers to find if the mullet hairstyle should be banned. (A higher number, incidentally – 56 percent – would like to ban the mullet than be honest about their taxes.)

So, if I chose to simply regard the numbers our weekly survey delivers, Kent has more well-coiffed citizens who aren’t averse to fudging their numbers. I am not sure if I like that, or living in Mullet Land with squeaky-clean fiscal priorities.

At least the well-coiffed version has a little more cash on hand.

Regardless of what you think of our surveys and pointless questions, the Taxpayer Attitude Survey is worth checking out.

It’s easy to find – just go to http://www.treas.gov/irsob, and you can download a version of it for yourself.

Unfortunately, we’ll never know, to the same degree, what our nation thinks about banning the mullet.