Abstract
The paper aims to examine the internal motivation of taxpayer’s behavior, and the factors affecting tax morale and voluntary tax compliance The authors provide scientific results of the tax experiments in post-Soviet countries (Russia and Belarus). The laboratory tax experiment was carried out in a form of a business game engaging students of various levels of education and background. The controllability of the experiment with the impossibility of material encouragement is ensured in the student’s environment in the form of scores to the final attestation. In order to obtain data on tax behavior motivation, a survey on attitude to tax system was conducted. Respondents (experiment participants) were asked to indicate their level of agreement with defined statements by Likert scale. To assess the differences between two groups of participants (who paid and who do not paid tax), the data obtained as a result of filling out the questionnaire using the Mann-Whitney U -test and the Kruskal-Wallis H -test were analyzed. The study results affirmed the hypothesis generated earlier, the personal tax morale influences the national tax system and the tax behavior of an individual. The article proves that the awareness of the ways government spends public revenue and the trust level to the state and tax system itself influence tax behavior directly. The civil awareness on the real state of fiscal distribution increases the trust level to the government among taxpayers and is the essential motivation to pay taxes. The developed methodology may be used in an educational process to increase tax literacy, its further application in the scientific research will allow us to derive evidence-based methods and ways to directly influence tax behavior, which may enlarge the public revenue in the times of an unstable global economy. Highlights 1. The study reveals that the tax audit affects more the amount of evading taxes than the number of evaders, where an increase of education level helps to reduce tax evasion through citizens, to make an individual more competent and more responsible as a taxpayer 2. Laboratory tax behavior monitoring of students allows us to identify the factors that influence on the real national tax behavior and tax experiments could become a tool for the formation of strategies of interaction between tax authorities and taxpayers in Russia and Belarus 3. The main incentives for paying taxes are the trust towards the government and the tax system and the understanding of the society-oriented character of the state FOR CITATION Kireenko A. P., Nevzorova E. N., Kireyeva A. F., Filippovich A. S., Khoroshavina E. S. Lab experiment to investigate tax compliance: the case of future taxpayers' behavior in Russia and Belarus. Journal of Tax Reform , 2018, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 266–290. DOI: 10.15826/jtr.2018.4.3.056 ARTICLE INFO Received August 14 , 2018; accepted October 22, 2018
Highlights
The world today is actively switching to electronic interaction in different spheres of life, and taxation is no exception
We developed the methodology of studying tax behavior using the experience of tax experiments from different countries that were based on “experiments with the public good”
– the tax refund combined with the income decrease resulting in the higher tax compliance only in the half of the sample
Summary
The world today is actively switching to electronic interaction in different spheres of life, and taxation is no exception. Electronic services facilitating interactions between taxpayers and tax authorities are being introduced at an impressive speed. All this may produce a false impression that such technological innovations could solve most problems of the taxation system, including the problem of tax evasion. Keep it in mind that interactions in the digital environment remain interactions between people who have their own interests and preferences. J. Schumpeter’s claim that “psychology is really the basis from which any social sciences must start and in terms of witch all fundamental explanation must run” [1] remains relevant in any economy, including a digital one. Without taking into account the motivation behind the taxpayers’ behavior it is hard to understand why people still pay taxes to the budget with very low detection probabilities for tax evasion, and how to increase the collection of taxes in the future without increasing the administrative pressure
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