About

Kathleen DeLaney Thomas is the Aubrey L. Brooks Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, where she joined the faculty in 2013. Her teaching and research interests include federal income taxation, tax policy, and contracts law. She has received the Frederick B. McCall Award for Teaching Excellence from the graduating class in 2018. Thomas is the author of numerous articles on tax policy and has written extensively on the intersection of tax compliance, behavioral law and economics, and technology and tax law. Her work has been published in several prestigious law reviews and journals. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the College of William & Mary, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and earned her J.D. and LL.M. in Taxation from NYU School of Law. Prior to her academic career, she practiced tax law in New York at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and Cooley LLP, and served as an Acting Assistant Professor of Tax Law at NYU School of Law.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Business
• Actuarial science
• Econometrics
• Public economics
• Law
• Accounting
• Law and economics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Taxing Attention

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tax Compliance, Social Norms, and Influencers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• More Information or More Frequent Information? A Proposal for Quarterly 1099s

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Third-party information reporting enhances tax compliance. When substantial information reporting is present, the compliance rate reaches 94 percent, compared to just 45 percent when there is little or no information reporting. Accordingly, policymakers have expanded information reporting requirements over the past several decades to enhance revenue collection. More recently, Congress has expanded information reporting requirements for third-party settlement organizations (“TPSOs”) by significantly lowering the reporting threshold from $20,000 to $600 as well as eliminating the requirement for 200 or more transactions. While such a shift will subject more taxpayers to information reporting, it will also create additional burden on the IRS to process the influx of new information returns. Although the new $600 threshold was enacted in 2021, the IRS has announced it will delay enforcement until at least 2025, using the old $20,000/200 transactions threshold for 2023, and a phased $5,000 reporting threshold for 2024. The IRS’s delayed implementation of the new $600 reporting threshold for TPSOs illustrates a tension in tax administration. More information is generally better for tax enforcement, as subjecting more taxpayers to information reporting means that more individuals should be deterred from cheating and should report their income accurately. However, casting a wider net imposes costs. First, more information returns impose a greater burden on the IRS to process those returns, as well as greater costs on the third parties that must issue the returns. Second, casting a wider net among taxpayers will likely increase the chances that nonreportable income shows up on information returns (for example, gross proceeds from casual sales that do not exceed basis), increasing complexity and confusion among taxpayers. Third, and relatedly, if information returns become too prevalent (particularly for nontaxable income), taxpayers may perceive they are not meaningful and they may lose some of their deterrent effect. Thus, in setting a threshold for information reporting, policymakers face a tradeoff between these costs and the foregone revenue that results from unreported income. The current approach to enhancing tax enforcement through information reporting has been to expand its use through either lowering the reporting threshold (as in the recent case of TPSOs) or widening the scope of third parties required to report. Either approach generally results in more information returns issued to more taxpayers. However, there is a third approach that has received virtually no attention in the United States: policymakers could also increase the frequency and efficacy of tax information sent to taxpayers. More specifically, Congress could require information returns to be sent quarterly to align with taxpayers’ estimated tax payment deadlines. While receiving quarterly tax information would likely help taxpayers make timely estimated tax payments, this approach is also not without costs. Third parties would have an increased burden to compile and distribute tax information four times rather than once a year. And although the IRS would not have to process quarterly information returns (which would be sent only to taxpayers), it would have to enforce a requirement to send quarterly returns (for example, by imposing penalties on third parties who fail to do so). This article will explore the tradeoffs between the current approach of expanding the scope of information reporting with an approach that requires more frequent information.

  Publisher

• Designing a Standard Business Deduction

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Predictive Analytics & the Tax Code

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2024-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Congress last reformed the nation’s current tax penalty regime ap-proximately three decades ago, long before the rise of big data and the advent of predictive analytics. With predictive analytics now gaining preeminence and its accuracy constantly improving, it is time for Congress to weave this technological innovation into the fabric of the Internal Revenue Code and, more specifically, the civil tax penalty regime. Doing so would enhance taxpayer compliance, augment transparency, and simultaneously ease many administrative burdens commonplace under the tax law.

  Publisher

• Tax and the Myth of the Family Farm

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Tax Information: The Case for Quarterly 1099s

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When an electricity provider wants customers to pay their bills monthly, it sends them a bill each month. Yet, this is not how the tax system works— at least not for independent contractors. Their taxes are due quarterly, but they receive a tax statement (Form 1099) only one time a year. It is up to the individual, then, to know when their taxes are due and how to pay them, and it is on that individual to estimate how much they owe each quarter. As a result, compliance for independent contractors—particularly for online platform workers—tends to be lacking. Failure to pay their estimated taxes subjects these taxpayers to potential penalties and causes the government to collect less tax revenue. There is a simple—yet entirely overlooked—reform that could vastly improve compliance when it comes to paying estimated taxes: third-party information returns (Form 1099s) should be issued to taxpayers on a quarterly basis. The idea is straightforward and intuitive. If the government wants people to pay taxes four times per year, it needs to effectively “bill” them four times per year. This idea is supported by social science research showing that, the more taxpayers are reminded to pay their taxes, the more likely they are to do so. This Article is the first to propose quarterly tax information returns. It offers a detailed proposal for a new Form 1099-ES, which would communicate quarterly earnings and provide guidance on how much to pay in estimated taxes. In doing so, this Article argues for rethinking the conventional wisdom surrounding tax information, taking a more taxpayer-focused approach. Rather than viewing Form 1099s solely as a source of information for the government to monitor taxpayers and deter cheating, we should also view the role of information returns as assisting taxpayers in tracking their income and estimating their tax liability. When viewed in this light, the goal should not necessarily be more year-end returns to more people, but instead should be more frequent and useful information for taxpayers.

  Publisher

• Multibillion-Dollar Tax Questions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Implicit Legislative Bias: The Case of the Mortgage Interest Deduction

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Econometrics
  • Economics
  PublisherDOI

• Fake News and the Tax Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jay A. Soled

  13 shared

• James Alm

  Tulane University

  3 shared

• Richard L. Schmalbeck

  Duke University

  3 shared

• Leigh Osofsky

  3 shared

• Erin Adele Scharff

  2 shared

• Daniel Shaviro

  2 shared

• Lily L. Batchelder

  2 shared

• Hayes Holderness

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Frederick B. McCall Award for Teaching Excellence (2018)