Oh, come on, now. Admit it. You've shaved a little off your taxes at one time or another. If you didn't cheat on an exam in school, you wanted to.
And you know it's wrong.
There's no gray area here.
Yet the Internal Revenue Service estimated in 1998 it lost $278 billion in unreported tax revenues. That's about $1,000 for every man woman and child in this country. Not only that, about a fourth of Americans say it's OK to cheat on your taxes.
In a major national study released last fall, 74 percent of teen respondents said they had cheated on a test. That's up from 71 percent in 2000. And religion didn't seem to have much of an impact on the students' choices. Students at religious schools were more likely to cheat on exams (78 percent).
After a depressing 2002 in which corporate executives too numerous to count cheated shareholders . . . we have to ask whether cheating has become the new national norm," ethicist Kirk O. Hanson wrote in the Boston Globe on Jan. 19. Hanson is executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California.
"We have always had a few cheaters among us, but has the typical American now lost his or her moral compass? Have we lost our fundamental commitment to integrity and fair play?"
Maybe we have.
Through the decades Americans have told pollsters that we don't think it's morally right to lie, cheat or steal. It's the cultural norm to think like that.
Yet witness the daily little acts: not telling a clerk when he or she gives you too much change back, not reporting all of your tips as income on your taxes, giving yourself more credit for charitable contributions on your tax return than you actually gave, downloading a term paper off the Internet or burning music on a CD.
In the report on student cheating, done in 2002 by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, institute president Michael Josephson said, "The evidence is that a willingness to cheat has become the norm.'
"The scary thing is that so many kids are entering the workforce to become corporate executives, politicians, airplane mechanics and nuclear inspectors with the dispositions and skills of cheaters and thieves."
Hanson, in an interview, said that the areas of taxes and tests are largely based on "self-enforcement. They depend on the honesty of the individual. Teachers can't stand over each student during a test, and the IRS audits a very small percentage of returns. Then the opportunity is so great because it's just so easy to cheat."
So, if we all do it, is it right?
"It's wrong to cheat on any level," he said. "The fact that 80 percent cheat on tests does not make it right; it just says our level of honesty isn't that great."
Hanson said: "People are honest because of their own values and because of the fear of getting caught. One can reduce cheating by bolstering moral backbones and by increasing the chance of getting caught and the penalties of getting caught." If there's a real chance a corporate executive will go to prison or lose all income for cheating, there will be less cheating, he said.
"Values always interact with the opportunity," Hanson said.
Even though it seems that so many issues in today's world are getting murkier, Hanson is not confused. "Things aren't getting grayer," he said. "We as a country are much more educated and sophisticated about ethical issues. Our rationalizations are much more sophisticated than they used to be."