How to improve tax compliance? Evidence from population-wide experiments in Belgium
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Clement Imbert, Maarten Luts, Johannes Spinnewijn and Teodora Tsankova
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 costeffective, allowing for substantial savings on enforcement costs. ? 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
1 May 2021
Journal of Political Economy 129(5) , pp.1425-1463, 2021
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/713096
This Journal article is published under the centre's Community Wellbeing programme.