How to Improve Tax Compliance? Evidence from Population-Wide Experiments in Belgium
By J. De Neve, Clément A. C. Imbert, Johannes Spinnewijn, Teodora Tsankova, Maarten Luts. Journal of Political Economy, 2019
144 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the impact of simplification, deterrence, and tax morale on tax compliance. We ran four natural field experiments varying the communication of the tax administration with the universe of income taxpayers in Belgium throughout the tax process. A consistent picture emerges across experiments: (i) simplifying communication substantially increases compliance, (ii) deterrence messages have an additional positive effect, (iii) invoking tax morale is not effective and often backfires. A discontinuity in enforcement intensity, combined with the experimental variation, allows us to compare simplification with standard enforcement measures. We find that simplification is far more cost-effective, allowing for substantial savings on enforcement costs.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9cd238fd00e2a77e75ce35c17b4c451cd2bd8b16
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Citations in the corpus
- Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, unknown): “De Neve et al. (2021) study the impact of deterrence, tax morale, and simplifying information on tax compliance.”
- Nudging for Tax Compliance: A Meta-Analysis (2019, background): “The problem of cognitive overload is usually bypassed through the simplification of the communication language, the introduction of visual stimuli or provision of information how to file the income (De Neve et al. 2019, Eerola et al. 2019).”