Abstract
In recent years, policy makers as well as social scientists have begun to recognize that income tax evasion is a behavioral problem that seriously threatens the capacity of government to raise public revenue. It is a problem that transcends cultural and political boundaries. For example, estimates have indicated that the equivalent of 7,5% of Britain’s gross national product escapes legitimate taxation, while 17% of the taxable income in Belgium remains undeclared (Lewis, 1982). In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS, 1983) has estimated that the tax gap (the difference between taxes owed and taxes filed) was $ 81,5 billion for 1981; an amount that exceeded the federal deficit for that year. Beyond the prospect of substantial deficit reductions without spending cuts or tax increases, other benefits would be derived from minimizing tax evasion. As Spicer (1975) has noted, tax evasion tends both to undermine the resolve of honest taxpayers and, insofar as it occurs more frequently in some segments of the population than in others, to hinder realization of the distributional and equity goals of taxation.
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Hessing, D.J., Kinsey, K.A., Elffers, H., Weigel, R.H. (1988). Tax Evasion Research: Measurement Strategies and Theoretical Models. In: van Raaij, W.F., van Veldhoven, G.M., Wärneryd, KE. (eds) Handbook of Economic Psychology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7791-5_14
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