Tax evasion in the United States unlawful gains as income when filing annual tax returns (see e.g., "James v. United States") although such income is typically not reported. Suspected lawbreakers, most famously Al Capone, have been successfully prosecuted for tax evasion when there was insufficient evidence to try them for their non-tax related crimes. Reporting illegal income as earned legitimately may be illegal money laundering. In the United States, the IRS estimate of the 2001 tax gap was $345 billion. For 2006, the tax gap is estimated to be $450 billion. A more recent study estimates the 2008 tax gap in the range of $450 to
Tax evasion the tax authorities and the actual amount reported. In contrast, tax avoidance is the legal use of tax laws to reduce one's tax burden. Both tax evasion and avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they describe a range of activities that intend to subvert a state's tax system, although such classification of tax avoidance is not indisputable, given that avoidance is lawful, within self-creating systems. In 1968, Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker first theorized the "economics of crime", on the basis of which authors M.G. Allingham and A. Sandmo produced, in 1972, an economic model of