This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of why taxpayers behave the way they do. It reveals the motivations for why some taxpayers comply with the law while others choose not to comply. Given the current global financial climate there is a need for governments worldwide to increase their revenue collections via improving taxpayer compliance. Research into what shapes and influences taxpayer behavior is critical in that any marginal improvement in understanding and dealing with this behavior can potentially have a dramatic impact upon government revenue. Based on Australian data derived from the data bases of the Australian Taxation Office as an example, this book presents findings that provide lessons for tax systems around the world. Regardless of the type of tax system in place, taxpayers of all nationalities are concerned about how their tax authorities deal with non-compliance and in particular how the tax authorities go about encouraging compliance and ensuring a fair tax system for all. The book presents empirical evidence concerning taxpayer compliance behavior with particular attention being drawn to the moral values of taxpayers, the perceived fairness of the tax system and the deterrent measures undertaken by revenue authorities which influence that behavior. Other issues examined include the degree to which tax penalties operate as an effective deterrent to curbing behavior and how taxpayers' level of general tax knowledge and awareness also impacts upon their actions.
Tax is a prominent source of revenue to support the development of a country. In Indonesia, taxes are collected by the Directorate General of Taxes (DGT). The tax authority employs a Self-Assessment System (SAS) to collect taxes in Indonesia. However, the collection of taxes has not reached the target expected by the tax authority. This study aims to examine the factors that influence the compliance behaviour of individual taxpayers in Pelalawan Regency, Riau Province, Indonesia. It assumes that demographic and institutional factors have a significant influence on individual tax compliance behaviour. A self-administered survey was carried out among government officers in the Pelalawan Regency. Results of this study show that demographic factors (i.e. age, gender and level of education) do not have significant influence on individual tax compliance behaviour. However, institutional factors (tax knowledge, complexity, the probability of detection and the role of the tax authority) analysed reveal a significant influence for two of the factors, i.e. the probability of detection and the role of the tax authority. Therefore, this study suggests that the tax authority should devise strategies for detecting taxpayers who fail to comply. In addition, the tax authority should initiate methods to persuade taxpayers to fulfil their tax obligation.
Taxpayer compliance is a voluntary activity, and the degree to which the tax system works is affected by taxpayers’ knowledge that it is their moral and legal responsibility to pay their taxes. Taxpayers also recognize that they face a lottery in which not all taxpayer noncompliance will ever be detected. In the United States most individuals comply with the tax law, yet the tax gap has grown significantly over time for individual taxpayers. The US Internal Revenue Service attempts to ensure that the minority of taxpayers who are noncompliant pay their fair share with a variety of enforcement tools and penalties. The Causes and Consequences of Income Tax Noncompliance provides a comprehensive summary of the empirical evidence concerning taxpayer noncompliance and presents innovative research with new results on the role of IRS audit and enforcements activities on compliance with federal and state income tax collection. Other issues examined include to what degree taxpayers respond to the threat of civil and criminal enforcement and the important role of the media on taxpayer compliance. This book offers researchers, students, and tax administrators insight into the allocation of taxpayer compliance enforcement and service resources, and suggests policies that will prevent further increases in the tax gap. The book’s aggregate data analysis methods have practical applications not only to taxpayer compliance but also to other forms of economic behavior, such as welfare fraud.
Drawing on multiple disciplines with a significant interest in taxpayer compliance, Volume I critically reviews previous research on the subject, reaches conclusions and recommends future research programs to fill gaps in knowledge.
Consequently, the findings of the study suggest that tax morals and, to a lesser degree, tax fairness, tax law enforcement, tax awareness, gender, education and income level, directly and indirectly influence compliance behaviour. It is envisaged that the results of this study [will] provide useful information for the Australian revenue authority and have implications for tax policy development."--Abstract.
Tax evasion is a serious issue that influences governmental revenues, IRS enforcement strategies, and tax policy decisions. While audits are the most effective method of enforcing compliance, they are expensive to conduct and the IRS is only able to audit a fraction of the returns filed each year. This suggests that audits alone are not sufficient to curb the billions of dollars of tax evaded by taxpayers each year and that a better understanding of factors influencing compliance decisions is needed to enable policymakers to craft tax policies that maximize voluntary compliance. Prior research tends to model compliance as economic, environmental, or personal decisions; however, this study models it as a multifaceted decision where these three perspective individually and interactively influence compliance. It is the first to decompose perceived detection risk into two dimensions (selection risk and enforcement risk) and investigates how these two dimensions of risk, decision domains (refund or tax due positions), and three personal factors (mental accounting, narcissism, and proactivity) influence taxpayers' compliance decisions. I conducted a 2x2 fully crossed experiment involving 331 self-employed taxpayers. These taxpayers have opportunities to evade that employed taxpayers do not. For example, they can earn cash income that is not reported to the IRS by third parties. For self-employed taxpayers (especially those wanting to evade), perceived selection and enforcement risks may be distinctly different depending on a taxpayer's situation, what they believe they can control, and what risk they are willing to accept. For example, selection risk may be perceived as the greatest risk for those with unreported items on their return, while enforcement risk may be more prominent for those perceiving certain levels of selection risk. Thus, I believe self-employed taxpayers are the most appropriate population to sample from and are likely have reasonable variation in the three personal factors of interest. I find that taxpayers do differentiate between selection and enforcement risks but the difference only manifests for taxpayers in certain decision domains. Taxpayers in a refund position (i.e. conservative mindset) had a greater sensitivity to the form of payment (cash vs. check) and appeared to use this information to make inferences about enforcement risk which was significantly different from their perceptions of selection risk. Conversely, tax due taxpayers (i.e. aggressive mindset) appeared to overlook the form of payment and did not assess these two risks as significantly different. Evaluating the full sample suggests that both selection risk and enforcement risk have a positive influence on compliance. Further, these risks interact to influence compliance. Specifically, compliance is greatest when taxpayers perceive a high likelihood of being selected for an audit and enforcement risk only matters when selection risk is low. This finding is interesting and suggests that avoiding interaction with the IRS is a primary objective of taxpayers. In line with my findings of taxpayers perceiving different risks in refund and tax due positions, the influence of risk perceptions on compliance differed for taxpayers in these positions. Refund taxpayers were influenced by both selection and enforcement risk, similar to the full model; however, tax due taxpayers were only influenced by selection risk and appeared to completely overlook enforcement risk when making their reporting decision. Lastly, the study shows that personal characteristics can also influence compliance in the presence of economic and environmental determinants, but some characteristics only manifest in specific decision domains. Of the three personal characteristics investigated, only mental accounting orientation was a significant predictor for the full sample. When the sample was split by decision domain, only proactivity was a predictor of compliance for refund taxpayers, while only mental accounting orientation was a predictor of compliance for due taxpayers. While I did not find results for narcissism and compliance, my subsequent analysis suggests that individual dimensions of narcissism may be better predictors of compliance than the full measure. Specifically, the exploitation dimension was a significant predictor of compliance for those in a tax due position. This study make several contributions to the accounting and tax literatures. First, this study provides support for a two-construct conceptualization for perceived detection risk that includes both selection and enforcement risks. Second, it answers calls to investigate more comprehensive compliance models and finds economic, environmental, and personal characteristics individually and interactively influence compliance. Third, this study investigates three personal factors that have not been investigated in the tax compliance literature. Finally, this study answers calls for research on self-employed taxpayers and suggests that the IRS will be more successful in increasing compliance by playing on taxpayers' aversion to being selected for an examination than communicating information on the IRS' ability to detect noncompliance during an examination.
Thanks to the famous slippery slope theory, a wide range of factors influencing tax compliance behaviour have been studied in numerous papers. Still, the knowledge on the relationship between these factors and personality traits is limited. Studies mainly concentrated on the Big Five traits and assessed tax compliance behaviour as a phenomenon. The present study, by applying CFA and OLS linear regression on the survey data of 350 respondents, explores the relationships between the Big Five personality traits, HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and the influencing elements of tax compliance behaviour to understand who and why is more likely to evade taxes than others. We found that HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and Agreeableness affect more elements of the tax evasion behaviour than the other examined personality traits. We argue that this is because HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and Agreeableness are directly linked to the dilemma of prioritising individual or prosocial values and duties. Honesty-Humility seems to relate to almost all aspects of tax evasion and, thus, to be the most important determinant of tax compliance behaviour.
The topic and “problem of tax compliance is as old as taxes themselves” (Andreoni, Erard, & Feinstein, 1998, p. 816). This statement helps explain why tax compliance issues remain such popular topics in the stream of academic and practitioner research. Much of the past research on tax compliance or non-compliance can be grouped into three main categories that relate to deterrence, economic reasons, and social or psychological theories (Cuccia, 1994). In a review of extant literature in these areas, research gaps remained to which this dissertation contributed. Specifically, gaps related to the relationship between tax compliance and personality traits, as well as a deeper understanding of the moderating influence of national culture on known influential variables related to tax compliance intentions were assessed. Two separate but interrelated studies were conducted to shed new light on the tax compliance issue: One study used survey data collected from individuals that file taxes in the United States while the other study employed secondary data from available archival sources (i.e., wave six of the World Values Survey). Various statistical techniques were employed including multilevel analysis (hierarchical linear modeling) as well as multivariate linear regression. Findings indicate that personality, specifically the trait of extraversion, bears a relationship with taxpayer non compliance intentions. Furthermore, results provide support for certain national cultural dimensions (masculinity, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance) having a moderating influence between several demographic predictors and taxpayer compliance intentions. Implications and limitations of this research are also provided.
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.
