Taxpayers' Behavioural Responses and Measures of Tax Compliance ‘Gaps’: A Critique and a New Measure

The work of Feldstein (1995 and 1999) has stimulated substantial conceptual and empirical advances in economists' approaches to analysing taxpayers' behavioural responses to changes in tax rates. Meanwhile, a largely independent literature proposing and applying alternative measures of tax compliance has also developed in recent years, which has sought to provide tax agencies with tools to identify the extent of tax non‐compliance as a first step to designing policies to improve compliance. In this context, measures of ‘tax gaps’ – the difference between actual tax collected and the potential tax collection under full compliance with the tax code – have become the primary measures of tax non‐compliance via (legal) avoidance and/or (illegal) evasion. In this paper, we argue that the tax gap as conventionally defined is conceptually flawed because it fails to incorporate behavioural responses by taxpayers. We show that conventional tax gap measures, which ignore the presence of behavioural responses, exaggerate the degree of non‐compliance. This potentially applies both to indirect taxes (such as the ‘VAT gap’) and direct (income) taxes. Further, where these conventional tax gap measures motivate reforms designed to increase the tax compliance rate, they will likely have a tax‐base‐reducing effect and hence generate a smaller increase in realised tax revenues than would be anticipated from the tax gap estimate.     

国际税收协定与反避税

税收协定除对所得消除双重征税外,还有防止偷逃税(“财政逃避”)的重要目的。税收协定和反避税之间的关系十分紧密,反避税是税收协定的一个重要内容,是各国谈签协定的主旨之一。本文从反避税角度对协定中可能出现的协定滥用和避税问题进行了列举,并提出适时修订协定、完善国内法规、有效打击跨国偷逃税活动的建议。     

After the death of inflation: will fiscal drag survive?

Declining inflation rates might have negative consequences for tax revenues. Phenomena such as the inflationary bracket creep in a progressive income tax system do not work any longer. With this background, the paper analyses the extent of fiscal drag for OECD countries since 1965. Some consideration of the role of money illusion and indexation in this context lays the theoretical base. A framework is presented that allows for the classification of fiscal structures with regard to the type of fiscal drag. The subsequent econometric panel analysis is performed for total and disaggregated government revenues. The results back theoretical considerations of inflation's impact on different kinds of taxes, which tends to be positive for individual income taxes and social security contributions and is negative for corporate income taxation. The paper concludes that both declining inflation and changing tax structures limit the potential for future fiscal drag.     

Local fiscal equalisation based on fiscal capacity: the case of Austria

This paper deals with local fiscal equalisation in Austria. The system of intergovernmental relations in Austria includes different regulations in order to equalise differences in the fiscal capacity of the municipalities. This leads to so‐called ‘compensation effects’, because additional revenues from a local government's own tax are (at least partly) compensated by losses from equalisation grants. This paper carries out a detailed analysis of these compensation effects. It is shown that they create strong fiscal disincentives for the local governments: on average, 55 per cent of additional revenues from the communal tax (which is the most important of a local government's own taxes) are compensated by losses of equalisation grants. In extreme cases, local governments can lose up to 144 per cent of the additional tax yields collected. These local governments would be better off if they made no effort to increase their tax base.     

Tax Evasion and Auditing in a Federal Economy

This paper analyzes the relation between tax auditing and fiscal equalization in the context of fiscal competition. We incorporate a model of tax evasion by firms into a standard tax competition framework where regional governments use their audit rates as a strategic instrument to engage in fiscal competition. We compare the region’s choice of audit policies for three different cases: A scenario of unconfined competition without interregional transfers, a scenario with a gross revenue equalization (GRS) scheme and finally, a scenario with net revenue sharing (NRS), where not only the revenues from taxation but also the regions auditing costs are shared. Without regional transfers, fiscal competition leads to audit rates which are inefficiently low for revenue-maximizing governments. While in general GRS aggravates the inefficiency, NRS makes the decentralized choice of auditing policies more efficient.JEL Code: H26, H71, H77     

Tax morale and public spending inefficiency

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging tax compliance is an important and debated policy issue. Many studies have shown that tax cheating has to be attributed to a considerable extent to the tax morale of taxpayers. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the relationship between the taxpayer and the public sector; specifically, we investigate whether public spending inefficiency shapes individual tax morale. Combining data from Italian municipalities’ balance sheets with individual data from a properly designed survey on tax morale, we find that the attitude towards paying taxes is better when resources are spent more efficiently. This evidence seems not to be driven by some confounding factor at the municipality level or by spatial sorting of citizens and proves robust to accounting for alternative measures of both inefficiency and tax morale. We also find that the negative effect of inefficiency is larger if the level of public spending is lower and/or the degree of fiscal autonomy is higher.     

新个人所得税法对扣纳双方的影响及应对——基于扣缴人义务及纳税人行为视角

新个人所得税法在实践中的运行效果取决于征纳双方在税收征管过程中的耦合作用。一方面,作为联系税务机关与纳税人的中介与桥梁,扣缴人在个税预扣预缴及汇算清缴方面发挥着重要作用;另一方面,税制结构变化与缴税申报模式转变对纳税人影响深远。在新个人所得税下,扣缴人的扣缴清缴合规、沟通保密及判定审查等义务均有不同程度的增加、拓展或提升。而纳税人的缴税申报、现金管理及税收规避等行为更易于引致税务管控及稽查。落实应对建议有助于促使扣纳双方在税务合规的框架内发挥正向合力作用,凭借税收法治助力个税财政收入的实现。     

Collusive tax evasion and social norms

Although collusive tax evasion by buyers and sellers of commodities and also by employers and employees is widespread all over the world, it has rarely been analyzed in the tax evasion literature. To fill this gap and to compare collusive tax evasion with independent tax evasion, this paper develops a simple noncooperative game-theoretic model and confirms the model’s predictions in a laboratory experiment. Because collusive tax evasion involves social interaction, this paper focuses on the effect of social norms and theoretically and empirically demonstrates that the tax compliance norm has a stronger negative effect on the magnitude of collusive tax evasion than on independent tax evasion. The reason for this result is that in a collusive tax evasion game with multiple equilibria social norms affect the range of equilibria and act as an equilibrium selection device, whereas social norms need to be strongly internalized to change the behavior of taxpayers who evade taxes unobservedly.     

Tax competition and tax base equalization in the presence of multiple tax instruments

The literature on tax competition has argued that tax base equalization, which reduces regional disparities in tax bases, can serve as a means of internalizing horizontal and vertical fiscal externalities. This argument assumes that each government relies on a single tax base (a regional tax on mobile capital and a federal tax on savings). This paper considers the case in which a distortionary labor tax is also available. Internalizing fiscal externalities requires that while the regional capital tax base is fully equalized, a region’s equalization entitlement for the labor tax is positive when its tax base is “larger” than the average tax base of all regions. This efficient tax base equalization system is incompatible with the primary objective of fiscal equalization.

     

经济增长、税收收入与宏观税负——基于中国宏观经济数据的实证研究

本研究以经济增长、税收收入与宏观税负三者间的关系为研究对象,利用中国2006年第1季度至2011年第3季度的税收收入、GDP和所计算得出的小口径宏观税负的数据,以供给学派经济学家亚瑟.拉弗（Arthur Laffer）提出的著名的＂拉弗曲线＂（Laffer-curve）为指导,建立计量经济模型,分别测算实现经济增长最大化的宏观税负和实现政府税收收入最大化的宏观税负,并分析了中国税收收入与经济增长的关系,为近年来中国积极推进财税体制改革和近期出台的结构性减税政策提供支持。     

The effects of International Financial Reporting Standards,auditing and legal enforcement on tax evasion: Evidence from 37 African countries

This study examines the significance of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), audting and legal enforcement on tax evasion for a group of 37 African countries for the period 2008–2017. These countries were subsequently regrouped into subsamples of four clusters. Three-stage least square regression was used for the analysis. The results indicate that there is a negative and significant relationship between IFRS and tax evasion in some clusters (i.e., early IFRS adopters and strong legal enforcers). The other clusters (late IFRS adopters and weak legal enforcers) have a similar sign of coefficient though statistically insignificant. Moreover, evidence suggests that adoption and application of IFRS lead to improved financial reporting quality and lessen tax evasion in some African jurisdictions. Additionally, legal enforcement is found to be statistically significant in relation to tax evasion in two clusters (i.e., early IFRS adopters and strong legal enforcers). Some African countries are slow or ineffective in adopting and implementing IFRS, which by itself cannot improve tax compliance. IFRS can only achieve its objective when there is strong legal enforcement (e.g., control of corruption, rule of law, effective regulatory framework, voice and accountability, strong monitoring, and auditing to promote transparency). More evidently, in contrast to weak legal enforcers, countries with strong legal enforcement have high IFRS compliance, which can strengthen auditing and reporting standards and hence, improve tax compliance.     

Determinants of tax evasion: A cross-country investigation

The purpose of this study is to expand on the work of Riahi-Belkaoiu [Riahi-Belkaoiu, A. (2004). Relationship between tax compliance internationally and selected determinants of tax morale. Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, 13, 135-143] and systematically investigate, on a cross-country basis, many of the key determinants of tax evasion identified by Jackson and Milliron [Jackson, B. R., & Milliron, V. C. (1986). Tax compliance research: findings, problems and prospects. Journal of Accounting Literature, 5, 125-165]. Based on data for 45 countries, the results of the OLS regression analysis show that non-economic determinants have the strongest impact on tax evasion. Specifically, complexity is the most important determinant of tax evasion. Other important determinants of tax evasion are education, income source, fairness and tax morale. Overall, the regression results indicate that the lower the level of complexity and the higher the level of general education, services income source, fairness and tax morale, the lower is the level of tax evasion across countries. These findings remain robust to a broad range of cross-country control variables, an alternative tax evasion measure and various interactions.     

Tax compliance under horizontal and vertical equity conditions: An experimental approach

Tax compliance is a complex phenomenon, which requires to be addressed from different perspectives. We report the results of a real-effort experiment aiming at testing the effect of different equity conditions on individual tax compliance levels. We show that equity considerations seem to change individual behaviour only when a vertically unfair tax system is implemented. Also, random effects Tobit estimations show that being audited in the previous period has a negative effect on tax evasion, whereas the level of the fine paid in the previous period positively affects income underreporting. Also, we find that when subjects are in the vertical inequity condition they are significantly more likely to fully evade taxes than in the equity condition, whereas such result cannot be found in the horizontal inequity condition. Finally, we find a standard gender effect showing that female participants are less likely to evade taxes than man and that risk aversion negatively affect tax evasion behaviour.     

影响纳税人税收遵从决策的因素

税收遵从决策是纳税人行为选择的一个复杂过程,其中起作用的因素很多,除了经济因素,还包括非经济因素。按照经典的逃税模型——A-S模型①所揭示的主要因素是稽查概率和罚款率,除此之外影响纳税人遵从决策的因素还包括:税收遵从成本、税制、纳税人个体特征、对政府的满意程度以及税收文化等。     

Fiscal Externalities and Efficient Transfers in a Federation

This paper investigates properties of the second best allocation in a fiscal federal system in which both federal tax and intergovernmental grants are involved and the taxation is distortionary. Also, optimal federal grants and tax policies in a decentralized fiscal system are examined. Our major findings are: (i) the second best does not require the equalization of marginal cost of public funds across regions in a conventional form; (ii) matching grants based on either the local tax rates or tax revenues should be introduced to internalize the tax externality; and (iii) once lump-sum and matching grants are optimized, federal tax policy becomes redundant so the optimal fiscal gap is indeterminate.     

The Distributional Implications of Income Under‐Reporting in Hungary*

The ability and inclination of specific social groups to evade tax vary widely, and this leads to considerable variation in the actual tax burden on individuals with similar levels of income. Thus, ignoring tax evasion can be seriously misleading in terms of the distributive and fiscal effects of the tax system. This paper estimates the distributional implications of income tax evasion in Hungary, based on a random sample of the administrative tax records of nearly 230,000 individuals. Gross incomes declared in the administrative tax returns are compared with incomes stated in a nationally representative household budget survey. Our estimates show that the average rate of underreporting is 9–13 per cent, though this conceals a big difference between the self‐employed (who hide the greater part of their income) and employees. The estimates are likely to be lower bounds. These rates are used in a tax– benefit microsimulation model to calculate the fiscal and distributional implications of under‐reporting. Tax evasion reduces households' personal income tax payments by about 16–20 per cent. While the poverty rate increases only slightly, income inequality rises significantly, suggesting that high‐income households tend to evade tax proportionately more. Finally, we find that tax evasion largely reduces the progressivity of the tax system.     

分税与地方财政支出结构

本文研究了税收分成对地方财政支出结构的影响。理论分析发现,在地方政府的财政支出结构竞争中,税收分成比例的提高将直接导致地方政府增加生产性公共支出,发挥生产性支出的产出外部性,提高产出水平和自身税收收入水平,实现福利最大化。一系列经验分析显著地验证了上述结论,即当地级市政府的税收分成率提高10%,该地区生产性支出占比将提高1.39%。本文的分析和结论有助于解释中国地方财政支出结构变动的原因,从而为政府间税收分配改革提供有效的政策建议。     

我国税收遵从影响因素的实证分析

通过对国内外有关税收遵从研究进行总结和评述,明确了税收遵从研究的范围、思路;基于税收遵从影响因素的理论假设,实证分析了税制、税率、信息非对称、税收征管及人们公平感觉等因素对税收遵从的影响。从我国税收遵从的现状出发,结合税收征管实践,得出影响我国税收不遵从的主要因素和税收流失规模,提出提高我国税收遵从度的对策。     

The Costs of Restrictive Trade Policies in the Presence of Factor Tax Distortions

This paper uses a numerical general equilibrium model to examine the quantitative importance of pre-existing factor tax distortions for the welfare effects of tariffs and import quotas. The presence of pre-existing taxes can greatly raise the costs of these policies, possibly by over several hundred percent. For a tariff much of this extra cost can be offset if tariff revenues are used to reduce distortionary taxes. Hence there can be a large cost discrepancy between tariffs and quotas. The optimal tariff for a country with market power in trade can be reduced to zero, unless revenues finance cuts in distortionary taxes.     

Tax competition and fiscal equalization under corporate income taxation

This paper challenges the view that tax base equalization by the so-called representative tax system (RTS) removes inefficient undertaxation in corporate tax competition. The innovation of the paper is that it focuses on a tax on corporate income, instead of the unit tax on capital considered in previous studies. We employ a tax competition model with fiscal equalization and show that the RTS fails to fully internalize pecuniary and fiscal externalities. As a consequence, the RTS yields inefficiently low tax rates in the Nash equilibrium of the tax competition game between governments. Tax revenue equalization performs even worse, but combined with equalization of private income it implements the efficient tax rates on corporate income.