PEOPLE HAVE COME up with all sorts of proposals for getting South Carolina out of our lingering fiscal crisis, from raising taxes to eliminating agencies.

But there's a much less painful way: Make everybody pay the taxes they owe.

It's truly that simple. Perhaps not easy, but simple.

Although we can't say for sure, there's good reason to believe that if everyone in South Carolina paid the taxes they should, we wouldn't have a budget problem.

The latest indicator of this came when the Multistate Tax Commission reported last month that South Carolina loses an estimated $80 million a year to corporate tax cheating and sheltering, due in part to "structural weaknesses and loopholes in the state corporate tax systems." That's a huge loss when you consider that the state collects just $192 million in corporate income taxes. It's an unacceptable loss when you consider that just six states let more corporate tax revenue slip away.

But corporate tax sheltering is just one part -- and likely a small part -- of our problem with people not paying their fair share:

- Revenue officials say more than 50,000 South Carolinians who should file state income tax returns don't. And thousands who do file tax returns don't bother to pay the taxes they acknowledge they owe, unless and until they get a knock on the door from a tax collector.

- South Carolinians skip out on paying more than $200 million a year in use taxes -- the equivalent of a sales tax -- on Internet, phone and mail purchases.

- As many as 128,000 cars and trucks in the state aren't licensed and registered, which means their owners aren't paying property taxes on them.

We have nobody but ourselves to blame for the property tax cheating; until earlier this year, our laws made it virtually impossible to address the problem.

But Washington has played a part in the sales and income tax problems.

The Congress is actively hindering our ability to collect sales taxes on Internet and phone purchases, by prohibiting states from treating them the same way they treat Main Street sales -- requiring the merchant to collect the tax and send it to the government.

Further, the Congress has done nothing to change a tax system that encourages income tax sheltering. And in recent years, the Internal Revenue Service turned a blind eye to income tax cheating, particularly among the wealthiest individuals and businesses. This reduced the number of tax cheats who got caught by the feds, and subsequently had to pay state taxes; and it emboldened even more people to cheat.

The good news is that the IRS has begun to go after the proliferating tax shelter industry.

The bad news is that South Carolina has done just the opposite. As tax revenues in our state slumped, the Legislature actually reduced the state's ability to collect taxes, by slashing the Revenue Department's budget. The number of Revenue employees dropped from 749 in 2001 to 563 at the end of last fiscal year. And that was before its latest $2 million budget cut kicked in.

Revenue Director Burnett Maybank says that with another $10 million, he could catch $90 million in unpaid taxes; he even promised to resign if he failed. There is every reason to believe he would succeed: When legislators set aside $900,000 a year ago for the department to rehire some of the auditors it had laid off, they quickly pulled in an extra $20 million.

What's inconceivable is that legislators aren't willing to make more of this sort of investment.