Tax Compliance And Tax Morale

The book will be of considerable assistance to students and other researchers working in the area of compliance behaviour, or more generally, in the area of designing empirical studies. Margaret McKerchar, The British Accounting Review Torgler s book is a valuable contribution to the tax field, especially as it pioneers research into tax morale that is in its infancy and helps redress the US domination of the tax-compliance literature. It places econometric analysis where it rightly belongs as the supporting act, not the main feature! and takes a holistic approach in attempting to explain the complex area of human behaviour that tax compliance involves, whatever the country. Jeff Pope, Agenda Benno Torgler has written an exciting and important book. His careful and imaginative use of survey and experimental data explores important behavioral and institutional dimensions of tax policy and administration that have been too long neglected. The book provides a thorough exposition of what we now know about these issues as well as a rich menu of suggestions about how to do empirical research on the relation between citizens and states and how to build social capital through rethinking how states tax their citizens. Richard M. Bird, University of Toronto, Canada The question of why citizens pay their taxes has attracted increased attention in the tax compliance literature of late. In this book, Benno Torgler considers the evidence that suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance within society. To attempt to resolve this puzzle, numerous researchers have argued that citizens attitudes towards paying taxes (defined as tax morale) help to explain the high degree of compliance. Yet most have treated tax morale itself as a black box, failing to discuss the issues influencing it. This unique volume provides important new insights into the factors that shape the emergence and maintenance of citizens willingness to cooperate with tax legislations in different societies. Distinctive in its examination of citizen tax morale and tax compliance, this book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and students concerned with economics, political science, sociology, social psychology and accounting. It will also appeal to policymakers and practitioners.

Unlocking what drives tax morale – the intrinsic willingness to pay tax – can greatly assist governments in the design of tax policies and their administration, particularly in developing countries where compliance rates are low. This report builds on previous OECD research to identify some of the key socio-economic and institutional drivers of tax morale across developing countries, and seeks to test for evidence of the social contract by examining the impact of public services on tax morale. It also uses new data on tax certainty as an entry point to explore tax morale in businesses, where existing research is very limited. Finally, the report identifies a range of factors related to the tax system that may affect business decision making, how they vary across regions, and suggests some areas for future research. Overall, the report provides a range of suggestions for further work, and how tax morale considerations can be integrated into holistic tax compliance strategies.

Widespread voluntary tax compliance plays a significant role in countries’ efforts to raise the revenues necessary to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. As part of this process, governments are increasingly reaching out to taxpayers – current and future – to teach, communicate and assist them in order to foster a “culture of compliance” based on rights and responsibilities, in which citizens see paying taxes as an integral aspect of their relationship with their government.

Over the last several decades, there has been a growing interest in theoretical, empirical, and experimental work on all aspects of tax compliance and tax evasion. The essays in this volume summarize the existing state of knowledge of tax compliance and tax evasion, present new thinking about this issue, and analyze the empirical relevance of these new perspectives. The original essays in this volume represent an attempt to provide a framework on compliance that moves beyond the economics-of-crime perspective, one that provides a more complete understanding of individual (and group) decisions, and one that is more consistent with empirical evidence. It is the insights of behavioural economics that provide much of the bases for these essays and the main theme running through this book is that the basic model of individual choice must be expanded, by introducing some aspects of behaviour or motivation considered explicitly by other social sciences.

Volume 31 of Advances in Taxation includes studies from expert contributors, exploring topics such as: firms’ domestic and foreign effective tax rates; tax avoidance; and tax compliance. A study reviews prior literature on tax increment financing, an economic development tool frequently used by U.S. local governments.

Experts discuss strategies for curtailing tax evasion

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Law - Tax / Fiscal Law, grade: 3.5, University of Nigeria, language: English, abstract: In Nigeria, the need to improve voluntary payment of taxes or voluntary tax compliance has resulted in the various tax reform attempts by various successive governments. Suffice to mention that these reforms have not been able to stimulate the expected increase in tax revenue over the years, and this has snowballed into an unarguable tax gap as revealed in the share of income taxes in total revenue profile of the country. This poor tax compliance behavior often referred to in the literature as the “compliance puzzle” is a challenging experience across countries but suspected to be more critical in developing economies. In modeling tax compliance, the answer under the traditional theory of compliance is fear of detection and punishment. However, this model has been found to be inadequate in explaining the motives and intentions for tax compliance. The argument is that tax compliance may be subdivided into compliance resulting from enforcements or influence of tax authorities and voluntary compliance. This leads to a logical question which interestingly extends the compliance issue; what would lead citizens to behave more honestly, provide correct information and improve the tax compliance rate voluntarily? One answer to this question is the existence of an intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, which have been sometimes called, “tax morale”. Tax morale has evolved as an instrumental component in understanding voluntary tax compliance using a more integrated approach with a bias for non-economic factors. This study argues that the citizens’ perception of government accountability is an instrumental factor that shapes the emergence and maintenance of tax morale resulting in voluntary tax compliance. The underlining framework is that there is a social contract that defines the relationship between the government and the governed.

Unlocking what drives tax morale - the intrinsic willingness to pay tax - can greatly assist governments in the design of tax policies and their administration, particularly in developing countries where compliance rates are low. This report builds on previous OECD research to identify some of the key socio-economic and institutional drivers of tax morale across developing countries, and seeks to test for evidence of the social contract by examining the impact of public services on tax morale. It also uses new data on tax certainty as an entry point to explore tax morale in businesses, where existing research is very limited. Finally, the report identifies a range of factors related to the tax system that may affect business decision making, how they vary across regions, and suggests some areas for future research. Overall, the report provides a range of suggestions for further work, and how tax morale considerations can be integrated into holistic tax compliance strategies.

This book presents new data to give an overview of shadow economies from OECD countries and propose solutions to prevent illicit work.