بینش رفتاری در زمینه مالیات بر کسب و کار Behavioral Insights on Business Taxation: Evidence from Two Natural Field Experiments

1 Introduction Tax non-compliance is a serious concern to governments worldwide.1 Outstanding tax debt payments undermine the ability of governments to provide public services and pose a threat to the perceived fairness of the tax system. According to the latest Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimates for the years 2008 to 2010, the average annual tax gap in the US amounted to $458 billion – 18.3 percent of the total revenue owed (IRS, 2016). Despite substantial collection efforts of the IRS, a considerable part of this tax liability will never be paid. Even in countries with a relatively small population like Australia, collectable tax debt is $19.5 billion annually (ATO, 2015). The major share of this amount can be attributed to businesses who often owe more than twice as much as individual taxpayers (Ariel, 2012). Businesses and self-employed persons have more opportunities to evade taxes because they are less often subject to tax deducted at the source of their payments and to third party reporting (Thomas, 2013). As a consequence, only about half of business non-compliance is detected (Kamleitner et al., 2012). Business taxpayers have also been found to have a lower tax morale, ie. a lower intrinsic willingness to meet their tax obligations, than individual taxpayers (Torgler, 2007). Other studies find no difference in tax morale between business owners and employees in terms of personal norms regarding tax honesty, but a greater share of business owners admits to have evaded tax payments (Ahmed and Braithwaite, 2005). Consequently, business taxpayers constitute a highly relevant target group for tax collectors trying to increase voluntary tax compliance. Despite the substantial contribution of business taxpayers to government revenue, research on the behavioral foundations of business tax compliance is rather scarce (Hallsworth, 2014; Gangl et al., 2014; Arcos-Holzinger and Biddle, 2016) for three main reasons: First, due to its nature, it is difficult to observe tax non-compliance. In the face of potential punishment, evading taxpayers will try to conceal their actions and are unlikely to respond correctly even in anonymous surveys (Slemrod, 2016). This behavior is even more likely for businesses because there may be more than one person responsible for filing. Second, most tax administrations refrain from engaging in field evaluations testing the effect of alternating policies to improve compliance behavior. Third, most trial research on tax behavior focuses on one intervention only rather than analysing multiple approaches to influence the same decision process. Randomized controlled field experiments have emerged only very recently as a tool to investigate tax compliance (Wenzel and Taylor, 2004; Dwenger et al., 2016). Most of these experiments have focused on individual taxpayers, while business taxpayers remain understudied (Gangl et al., 2014; Hallsworth, 2014; Ariel, 2012).