In an article for the New York Law Journal, attorney Elliott Silverman and psychiatrist Stephen Coleman argue that one's failure to file income tax forms may be due to a form of procrastination syndrome. "Failure to file is a crime only if done 'willfully,' i.e., with the specific intent to violate the law. Accordingly, evidence that a failure to file is the result of mental illness, rather than an intent to disobey the law—assuming, of course, that the evidence is accepted by the jury—is a valid defense to a prosecution for a failure to file, even if the mental illness does not rise to the level necessary to support an insanity defense." Coleman comments that the patients he studied "share a common personality type called obsessive compulsive. They are often highly ambitious, competitive, hard-working, perfectionistic, hypercritical, detail-oriented people. They tend to procrastinate, have an inability delegate and lack the ability to relax easily."

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