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The purpose of this paper is to focus on the role of the tax agent as a preparer of tax returns and provider of professional tax advice under a system based on self‐assessment principles. It recognises the competing pressures under which tax agents attempt to discharge their professional responsibilities, and examines the implications for potentially unethical behaviour.

The paper uses a mail survey of tax professionals in Western Australia. Respondents are presented with realistic tax return scenarios, in which the demands of the client are varied according to the risk of audit, the severity of tax law and the materiality of dollar amounts involved.

The findings suggest that the severity of tax law violation is an important factor in ethical decision‐making, but that audit risk and the amounts involved are not.

The lack of support for audit risk as an influential variable is an important outcome, because policy makers have traditionally proceeded on the basis that increases in audit probabilities will reduce the likelihood of taxpayers adopting aggressive tax reporting positions. However, since the findings are based on an Australian sample, care must be taken in generalizing these findings elsewhere.

The implications are important in that alternative enforcement and compliance strategies must be considered by tax administrators.

The paper extends empirical research into taxpayer attitudes to those of the preparers of tax returns. The findings will be of relevance both to tax agents and to tax administrators.

The resolution of tax issues present significant ethical dilemmas for tax practitioners. The nature and extent of ethical concerns has important implications both for the tax profession and tax administration. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there are significant differences in the ethical perceptions of tax agents and Big 4 practitioners.

A mail questionnaire was used to elicit data as to the frequency and importance of a range of ethical issues in tax practice.

Both groups rated highly those issues which relate primarily to the conduct of professional responsibilities. Ensuring “reasonable enquiries” were taken, maintaining an appropriate level of “technical competence” and “continuing to act” for a client, when not appropriate, were of most concern to practitioners.

The paper focuses on the tax profession in Western Australia, so the outcomes may not be generalisable elsewhere in either Australia or the rest of the Asia‐Pacific region.

There was a significant difference between the two groups with regard to “loophole seeking”. This has implications for client expectations of alternative roles: as “tax exploiter” for the Big 4, and as “tax enforcer/compliance” for the tax agent.

There have been few empirical studies reporting the range of ethical issues encountered in tax practice. To date the literature tends to treat the tax profession as a homogenous group, whereas this research demonstrates differences in ethical outlook between sole‐practitioners and large international public accounting firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the commonly used policy approach to subsidize the private provision of public goods by granting agents deductions with respect to their income or corporate tax burden.

In the framework of a microeconomic representative agent model the commonly used policy approach to subsidize donations by granting agents deductions with respect to their income tax burden is examined. The paper especially considers that most income tax schemes are progressive and deductibility is limited. After pointing to the problems arising from these specific properties of tax‐refund schemes the paper turns towards the effects that such a tax‐refund scheme has with respect to donations on the one hand and welfare on the other hand.

Findings shows that the effects of the commonly practiced methods of supporting donations depend crucially on the specific properties of the tax scheme and preferences of agents. While Pareto‐improvements and even Pareto‐efficiency can result from the implementation of such a scheme, it is also conceivable that some agents perceive a utility reduction.

The analysis builds on a static approach although taxation also exerts important dynamic effects. These effects have been neglected in the current paper as the interaction of taxation and preferences is already quite complex. However, they should be considered in future research.

Owing to the dependency of welfare effects on the tariff structure, income tax reforms as they are planned in many countries might not only induce a reduction in donations, but might as a result also alter the induced welfare effects.

The paper shows that the generally applied tax‐refund schemes constitute no effective means to induce optimal donation levels. Implications depend crucially on, e.g. deductibility ceilings and progressiveness of tax rates.

Virtually all of the completed research to date shows that taxpayer compliance costs are large and generally a multiple of the revenue authority’s administrative costs. Compliance costs have also been found to be capricious in their incidence and generally highly regressive. On the other hand, for some taxes (eg. Employer PAYE deductions), much of the research shows that larger firms derive a net economic benefit from enhanced cash flows. There is also perceived to be a fair correlation between high compliance costs and high non‐compliance. These findings and perceptions have led to government pressure in most developed countries to reduce compliance costs. This paper explores the likely impact of compliance costs in the UK as income tax self‐assessment is introduced, leaning on evidence from Australia, where self‐assessment is the standard.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between tax evasion and certain demographic factors such as location, engagement of tax agent, size and type of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) industry in Malaysia.

In this study, using proprietary tax audit data from the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (IRBM) on the 2011 tax returns of SMEs, the authors run a multiple regression analysis to examine the impact of location, agent, type of industry, size of enterprise and type of tax evasion on SMEs’ tax evasion in Malaysia.

The authors find that tax evasion among SMEs in Malaysia is the highest when the business is located in a suburban environment and has no tax agent. Tax evasion is also influenced by the size of the SME (micro or medium).

This study gives insight that the IRBM can use to aid its collection department in profiling SMEs that have a higher tendency to evade paying tax.

The purpose of this paper is to use the instrumental game theory to understand the behavior of the front agents tax evasion and tax authority in Brazil.

In order to analyze the taxpayer’s behavior before the Brazilian tax system and tax actions aimed at reducing tax evasion, the authors developed a theoretical model based on the payoffs of Graetz et al. (1986) and increased with situations proposed by Siqueira (2004), Lipatov (2006) and Oliveira (2011).

Considering the cases with and without specialists, the main results show that in high dropout situation, penalize taxpayers with high fines or deprivations of liberty may not be as effective. Another result of the analysis is that the audit and inspection costs played an important role in driving the equilibrium system.

One limitation of this study is to consider how the exogenous tax authorities earnings (Federal Revenue of Brazil and Federal Police) and not as a function of the goals and certain enforcement policies for each public body.

The authors suggest the following policy: investing in tax inspectors and unbureaucratic the authorities of the cost structure become a more effective tool to combat non-compliance with tax obligations that the intensity of the penalties imposed by the act of evading.

This paper contributes to the literature insofar as it models for the first time, using game theory, the behavior of the evading agent and the tax authority in Brazil.

Suggests that, as the UK moves to a system of self‐assessment for determining income tax liability, it is instructive to look at the experience of Australia, where such a system has operated for the last ten years. Reports that the Australian experience identifies significant changes in the operations of accountants, the ethical pressures to which they are subject and the rise of the “tax agent” as a specialized tax practitioner, all of which we might anticipate to be mirrored in the UK.

Since 2008-2009, the governments in France and Great Britain have encouraged more rigorous penalization of tax evaders. This paper aims to investigate the implementation of these policies on the basis of an important and original empirical material.

The study done in France relies on interviews conducted with representatives of law enforcement agencies on public statistics and on an innovative database compiled from nearly 600 cases submitted to the judiciary. The comparison with Great Britain is developed through interviews conducted with different participants in the fight against tax fraud and statistical information.

This paper describes the recent evolution of the machinery for screening tax-related wrongdoings in France and in the UK. It demonstrates that whilst publicly calling for harsh punishment against tax dodgers, in practice, both governments tend to seek a balance between the growing demand for tax equality and the belief that the State should not intervene in the economic realm. This strategy leads to the over-representation of certain categories of taxpayers. Despite the commonalities resulting from the numerous filters before prosecution, the penal strategy takes on two different shapes on either side of the Channel: whereas the British institutions support an “exemplary punitive” system, French regulatory system favours a “quasi-administrative” treatment. The French tax authority continues to use the criminal procedures mainly as a financial instrument for the improved restitution of stolen taxes. The policy of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, supported by the “Sentencing Guidelines”, aims much more at obtaining exemplary convictions.

Based on a large empirical material, this paper highlights the different outcomes of the criminal trials against tax evaders in the two countries.

This paper aims to explore factors influencing the effectiveness of tax audit in Tanzania. The study organized factors into four categories: organizational-related, tax auditors-related, taxpayers-related and regulatory-related factors.

The study used an explanatory approach, whereby data from 225 auditors in 23 tax regions in Tanzania were collected using a mailed questionnaire. The questionnaire had 25 statements representing factors and 5 statements representing the tax audit effectiveness. The collected data were analysed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. In the case of descriptive statistics, the study used frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation. For the inferential statistics, the study used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and multiple regression analysis.

The study findings showed that there were five main critical factors for tax audit effectiveness. The first factor, which is the implementation of tax auditors’ recommendations by management, was found under the organizational category. The second factor, which was adequacy of tax audit unit, was found under the tax auditors’ category, while the third factor was taxpayers’ attitude, found under the taxpayers’ category. The fourth and fifth factors, which were availability and application of regulations and standards for tax audit, and leadership and tax policies for tax audit, respectively, were found under the regulatory category.

Despite the contributions of this study, there are some limitations which need to be acknowledged. First, data were collected from tax auditors only. Second, only 25 statements for factors were used. Third, the study has used only primary data. Last, the study has used perceptual measures of tax audit effectiveness. The authors consider that if other approaches were used, they could have reached different conclusions. Therefore, future studies could be conducted in the areas where limitations have been identified.

From a practical perspective, tax authorities may be relying heavily on tax auditors, as well as regulations and policies, for tax audit effectiveness. The study shows that taxpayers, management, as well as tax audit standards, are critical factors too. However, the study also has practical implications for governments, tax authorities, tax auditors as well taxpayers.

This paper extends prior research in the area of tax audit and is the first paper to use four categories of factors to analyse the influence of tax audit effectiveness, taking into consideration both tax authorities and taxpayers. It also used EFA, which helped to generate variables with multiple prior theories (i.e. theoretical triangulation). Hence, new theories were combined with old theories to produce findings which take into consideration the context of the country.

The purpose of this paper is to point out that tax fraud, recognized as a scourge by both governments and responsible tax-payers, hits public finances hard with an inevitable knock-on effect on general welfare. Based on this observation, key players interviewed for this paper, including magistrates, a trade unionist and a high-ranking official, will attempt to provide some possible solutions to help understand why significant sections of public opinion consider this very particular form of financial crime to be legitimate, largely inspired by the notion that tax fraud and evasion are socially acceptable and even seen as a national sport in certain countries.

The survey was carried out among 20 tax officials, a trade unionist, two magistrates and a high-ranking civil servant. The interviewees were carefully chosen for their ability to provide valuable insights into the reasons behind the lenient treatment of fraudsters by a state lacking the necessary means and structures to fight this crime.

The fight against tax fraud has clearly sparked numerous controversies around evaluation, scope, criminal perpetrators and cooperation between services.

Tax fraud, an offence committed with the aim of avoiding taxation or reducing the amount of tax to be paid, ranges from low-level illegal activity, such as undeclared work to make ends meet, to more serious offences, such as value-added tax carousel fraud. All the unpaid tax resulting from such blatant flouting of the law represent a serious loss of revenue for the state and local authorities.

The fight against tax fraud is crucial in determining taxpayers’ acceptance of the contribution required for state expenditure and investment. In a country such as France, where tax fraud is almost a national sport, combating this scourge will help restore the state’s budgetary sovereignty by making it central to people’s concerns about redistributive justice, tax equality and fair access to public goods.