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Tax evasion has been a major problem for governments around the world, with innovative and ever-changing schemes making the practice increasingly difficult to regulate. In light of this, this study aims to use the extended version of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) (Beck and Ajzen, 1991) to predict individuals’ intentions to engage in tax evasion.

The research adopts a two-stage approach for data collection and analysis. First, the authors obtained survey data from 150 taxpayers in Barbados to conduct multivariate analyses to test the validity of the study’s hypotheses. The authors also used several open-ended questions on the survey instrument to conduct thematic analyses to further explore the influence of the antecedents of intentions to engage in tax evasion. Second, the authors conducted a focus group with two tax officials and three tax advisors.

The authors find that attitudes toward the behaviour, perceived behavioural control and moral obligation are significant predictors of intentions to engage in tax evasion. Factors cited as encouraging tax evasion are perceived fairness, tax authorities’ institutional infrastructure and responses, potential financial benefit, perceptions of inequality, low level of trust in tax authorities, perceived poor use of tax revenues and poor treatment of taxpayers. Conversely, factors cited as discouraging tax evasion include fear of prosecution, high morals and potential adequate governmental regulation.

The study measures intentions to engage in tax evasion rather than actual behaviour. The study does not measure social desirability bias.

This paper tests the applicability of variables used in the extended version of the TPB to predict intentions to engage in tax evasion in a Caribbean-based emerging economy. It also applies a mixed-methods approach of collecting data from taxpayers, tax advisors and tax officials.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of public governance quality on tax evasion levels in old (pre-2004) and new (post-2004) European Union (EU) members before and after the 2004 EU-enlargement.

This study uses panel data of 28 EU countries over the period 1996-2015. Tax evasion is measured using an updated version of the shadow economy size based on the light intensity, as calculated by (Medina and Schneider, 2018). The World Bank’s worldwide governance indicators are used as a measure of public governance.

The results indicate that new EU members have higher tax evasion levels compared to the old ones before and after the 2004 EU enlargement. The findings also report that the public governance quality is superior in old members throughout the 1996-2015 period. Furthermore, the authors found that after the EU enlargement, tax evasion levels decreased in both EU groups; however, the authors noticed an improvement in the public governance quality in new members and a deterioration in old ones. Additional analysis confirms the impact of public governance quality as an effective tool for reducing tax evasion behavior in both EU groups before and after the EU enlargement.

The findings are potentially useful for EU policymakers in identifying the most effective tools that can minimize tax evasion levels in EU countries. Additionally, the results are alarming as they show the negative consequences of the EU enlargement in old EU members. Thus, policymakers should consider them when setting their rules and regulations to reduce the significant differences between both EU groups to prevent member states from potentially exiting the EU.

To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study that examines the tax evasion behavior and public governance quality in the EU before and after the EU enlargement.

The purpose of this study is to develop a comprehensive international tax evasion framework by examining how national cultural variables and economic structural variables impact individuals’ tax morale and tax evasion.

This study uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to simultaneously analyze direct and indirect paths between country-level variables, tax morale, and tax evasion.

The results of this study show that multiple cultural and structural level variables directly impact tax evasion. Further, multiple cultural variables indirectly impacts tax evasion via changing individuals’ tax morale attitudes. In that, higher tax morale leads to lower levels of tax evasion. Finally, the analysis demonstrates that tax morale attitudes and tax evasion levels differ significantly in developed countries versus in-transition or developing countries. In addition, the impact of these cultural variables and economic variables on tax morale and tax evasion differ depending on a country’s economic development.

This study further develops an understanding of how various cultural variables and economic variables impact tax evasion. Such that, some of the variables change tax morale attitudes which impacts tax evasion while other variables impact tax evasive behavior directly. This more holistic model can be used by researchers to further explore tax evasion behavior in an international context.

Policy makers should take note of this study when developing strategies to mitigate tax evasive behavior. Specific country characteristics, such as culture and economic structure, will impact how individuals respond to policy (e.g., new laws or penalties).

This paper aims to examine the impact of carbon emissions (carbon dioxide [CO₂]) reduction on tax evasion behaviour.

This study uses data from 200 countries from 2000 to 2017. The empirical analysis is based on various methodological tools, including ordinary least-squares model, fixed- and random-effects models. In addition, GMM and linear mixed model has been used for robustness purposes.

The results show that carbon emissions reduction significantly affects tax evasion behaviour; when carbon emissions decrease, tax evasion behaviour increases. This indicates that the reduction of CO₂ emissions is linked to significant costs, placing a financial burden on companies and leading them to evade taxes to counterbalance these costs.

This study has important implications, as it highlights that the efforts made by countries to minimize CO₂ emissions are associated with high costs and may lead to increased tax evasion, potentially contributing to countries’ budget deficits. The results provide valuable insights for policymakers and stakeholders to implement effective environmental and fiscal regulations that contribute to a sustainable and eco-friendly future. These regulations can help maintain a balance between improving economic growth and ensuring the protection of the environment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to test the impact of carbon emissions on tax evasion using macro-level data.

This brief paper discusses the relevance of conducting surveys that measure individuals’ attitudes for understanding fiscal behaviour. While many surveys assess individuals’ attitudes towards paying taxes (e.g. by asking them to what extent they believe tax evasion is ever justified), it is less clear whether individuals’ responses to such survey questions are indicative of the way they would behave in reality. The paper presents a discussion of the way attitudes have been assessed in tax surveys and assesses existing evidence to support a link between these attitude measures and actual compliance behaviour. The paper suggests several avenues to improve the predictive value of attitude measures, such as increasing the specificity of measures, using evaluation scales or mitigating social desirability biases. A series of recommendations are made for measuring attitudes and interpreting attitude surveys for the use of researchers planning to conduct survey work, as well as for the use of findings from taxpayer surveys in the design of tax policy and administration.

Overnight taxes are controversial. They affect tourists’ consumption behavior and hotels’ profits. This potentially generates undesirable industry practices such as underreporting overnights to evade overnight taxes. The aim of the paper is to understand the conditions and outcomes of underreporting. This is important because underreporting affects destinations’ tax income, which in turn may have further effects on tourism or other public services.

This study uses qualitative comparative analysis to identify what specific combinations of conditions motivate managers of hospitality businesses to evade overnight taxes.

While potential economic gain seems to be the obvious answer, this study finds that different configurations of causal conditions account for non-compliance. Four different configurations combining six conditions explain the logics behind hotel overnight tax evasion behavior. The conditions refer to both utilitarian affordances and the individual tax morale of hospitality managers. Certain utilitarian conditions in combination can overrule moral objections to non-compliance.

The study provides a nuanced understanding of overnight tax evasion motives and suggests how to connect work on tourism taxes with destination governance issues and destination management organization funding.

The purpose of this study is to examine tax stamp evasion at Twifu Atti-Morkwa and Hemang Lower Denkyira districts in the central region of Ghana.

A cross-sectional survey design was adopted to sample 305 micro-taxpayers through the use of multi-stage sampling technique. Primary data were collected from the micro-taxpayers using structured interview. Binary and multinomial logit regression models were used to regress the tax stamp evasion on economic and non-economic factors.

The study found that the likelihood of micro taxpayers to evade tax stamp is predicted by age, application of sanctions, guilt feeling, transportation cost to tax office and rate of tax audit. Thus, the study found partial support for expected utility, planned behaviour and attributory theories in explaining tax evasion behaviour of micro-taxpayers.

There are several measures of addressing tax evasion behaviour of micro taxpayers. Evasion behaviour can be deterred by enforcement strategies such as application of sanctions and regular tax audit, establishment of more tax offices in the districts and writing normative messages on the faces of tax stamp stickers.

This study helps explains the tax evasion behaviour of micro-taxpayers of a developing economy like Ghana using a special type of tax design meant to capture such taxpayers in the tax bracket. To the best of our knowledge, the study is unique in terms of the means of measuring tax evasion and the methodologies used.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of justice, culture and love of money on ethical perceptions about tax evasion. As well as gender will strengthen the influence of justice, culture and love of money on ethical perceptions about tax evasion.

The primary data were collected and analyzed using a popular component-based model called partial least square (PLS). PLS consists of two sub-models, measurement model or outer model and structural model or inner model. The measurement model shows how real or observable variables are latent variables to be measured. While the structural model shows the level of estimation between latent or construct variables.

The statistical analysis showed that neither the coefficient of gender (moderating variable) nor the interaction between gender and the exogenous variable are significant. Solimun (2010) explained that such moderating variable is called homologizer moderation (potential moderation). Homologizer moderation refers to variable that may potentially become a moderating variable influencing relationship between predictor (exogenous) and dependant variable (endogenous). This variable has no interaction with predictors or can be said to be insignificant on the dependent variable. In this study, gender is a potential moderating variable (homologizer moderation). Gender can potentially become a moderating variable influencing relationship between justice, culture and love of money and ethical perception on tax evasion. Gender does not have interaction with justice, culture and love of money or significant influence toward ethical perception on tax evasion.

There are very few studies on tax evasion from an ethical point of view so this study is not only important but also interesting because it shows that tax evasion is a classic problem taking place in nearly all countries that apply taxation system; cultural difference results in different views on ethical perceptions on tax evasion (Basri, 2015); this study uses the local wisdom of Balinese people, namely, Tri Hita Karana and thus, this study becomes relatively new; justice is one of the non-economic variables of tax compliance behavior (Darmawan, 2012), so that the researcher is interested in conducting further research on the effect of justice toward ethical perception on tax evasion; there are very few studies discussing love of money (Hnisz et al., 2013); therefore, research on the effect of love of money toward ethical perception on tax evasion is of necessity and the findings of previous studies that are inconsistent. The researcher predicted that there are contingency factors that influence the relationship between justice, culture and love of money toward ethical perceptions on tax evasion. As suggested by Baridwan (2012), gender, the moderating variable in this study, refers to masculine and feminine character as a dimension of social culture; this study is carried out in the Tax Service Office (KPP Pratama) of Badung Utara because during the 2015 tax year, KPP Pratama Badung Utara was one of the KPPs in Bali DGT Regional Office which experienced a decline in realization of revenues and a sharp decline in growth.

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.

This paper aims to explore the relationship among personality traits, tax morale and tax evasion intention of students. Using the five-factor model of personality ratings, this study hypothesizes that agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism are good predictors of both tax morale and tax evasion intentions of individuals. Further, this paper argues that tax morale correlates negatively with tax evasion intention.

A survey method was adopted and questionnaires were developed to elicit responses for the study. The study hypotheses were tested structurally using the partial least square-structural equation modelling technique.

The results of the study demonstrate the existence of a positive and statistically significant relationship between three dimensions of the personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience) and tax morale. Consistent with the expectation, the study also finds tax morale to be significant and negatively associated with tax evasion intention.

This study concludes from the findings that improving the tax morale of individuals could be an important way by which tax authorities can improve voluntary tax compliance and reduce the incidence of tax evasion by individuals.

The study uses all the dimensions of the five-factor model to examine the tax evasion intention of individuals. It also contributes to the theoretical literature by highlighting the mediating role of tax morale in the relationship between personality traits and tax evasion intention from an African perspective.