An egocentric model of the relations among the opportunity to underreport, social norms, ethical beliefs, and underreporting behavior

By Cynthia Blanthorne, Steven E. Kaplan. 2008

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A model of the relations among taxpayers' opportunity, social norms, ethical beliefs, and tax compliance is proposed and tested using structural equation modeling. High opportunity taxpayers, who may personally benefit from evasion, judged evasion as less unethical than low opportunity taxpayers. High and low opportunity taxpayers judged social norms similarly. Further, ethical beliefs partially (fully) mediate the relation between opportunity (social norms) and underreporting. Implications from our study to tax compliance researchers and policy makers are discussed.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4162448cd9cf49e4d75b09a0ca0476d5d6ea1147

How researchers see this paper

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. P. Leung
2. Amy M. Hageman
3. Donna D. Bobek
4. Gerald Chau
5. Peggy D. Jimenez
6. Govind S. Iyer
7. Charles F. Kelliher

In Gender Studies

1. Amy M. Hageman
2. Donna D. Bobek
3. Peggy D. Jimenez
4. Govind S. Iyer
5. Charles F. Kelliher

Citations in the corpus

• The Impact of Perceived Ethical Culture of the Firm and Demographic Variables on Auditors’ Ethical Evaluation and Intention to Act Decisions (2010, background): “Regarding social consensus, Blanthorne and Kaplan (2008) found that social norms discouraging underreporting of income in tax returns are significantly related to beliefs that underreporting of income in tax returns is unethical.”
• A critical review of Fischer tax compliance model: A research synthesis (2009, background): “In fact, ethical values influenced by social norms may prohibit taxpayers from engaging in tax evasion (Blanthorne and Kaplan, 2008).”
• Tax compliance in a social setting: The influence of social norms, trust in government, and perceived fairness on taxpayer compliance (2016, methodology): “The scale to measure subjective norms was adapted from Blanthorne and Kaplan (2008).”
• Analyzing the Role of Social Norms in Tax Compliance Behavior (2013, methodology): “The results of Blanthorne and Kaplan (2008) also suggest that individual ethical beliefs (personal norms) are particularly important, as they found that social (subjective) norms directly influence ethical beliefs, which in turn affect compliance behavior, but did not discover a direct relationship ”