The Culture of Taxation: Definition and Conceptual Approaches for Tax Administration
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Abstract
A problem of tax administration in many countries is that governments cannot collect all the taxes that are owed to them under the statutes. It is argued here that one primary reason for this is the “culture of taxation”. The primary objective of this paper is to synthesize the concept of the culture of taxation and the approaches used to study it. Previous literature in the area of tax compliance, tax evasion, tax administration and tax reforms are examined from the viewpoint of both taxpayers and tax collectors. The results based on this literature show that differences in the culture of taxation bring about different tax collection outcomes.
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