Taxpayers‘ subjective concepts of taxes, tax evasion, and tax avoidance
- Author(s)
- Christoph Kogler, Erico Kirchler
- Abstract
The motivation to comply or not to comply is considerably influenced by beliefs, attitudes, and social representations of taxpayers. These subjective conceptualizations and evaluations are often not objective or true, but they determine how citizens construct their subjective reality. Attitudes, judgments, and behavior intentions eventually shape people's behavior which is often more affected by what they think than by what actually is. We first explain what social representations are, how they are related to individual attitudes, and to what extent both social representations and attitudes shape behavior according to the existing psychological literature. In the following section we present three of our own studies on taxpayers' social representations of taxes and their attitudes towards tax evasion and tax avoidance. These empirical studies identify relevant differences in attitudes between different occupation groups: Self-employed entrepreneurs express less favorable views on taxes and the tax authorities and as a result feel more restricted and hindered in their work, while employed workers focus stronger on the exchange function between tax payments and the resulting provision of public goods. Despite the differences, in all occupation groups tax evasion is not perceived as a severe crime and tax evaders are even judged quite positively and as more intelligent than the typical tax payer. The most recent study suggests that tax evasion might not be evaluated as positive anymore as in earlier studies, but instead tax avoidance seems to bemorally accepted and taxpayers engaging in tax avoidance are judged more positive than the typical taxpayer.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Occupational, Economic and Social Psychology
- External organisation(s)
- Tilburg University
- Pages
- 191-205
- No. of pages
- 15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0089-3_8
- Publication date
- 11-2019
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 501029 Economic psychology
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences, General Arts and Humanities, Economics, Econometrics and Finance(all), General Business,Management and Accounting
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/37abd354-9f7c-4ad0-b03a-fc5282a533c4