TITLE:
Tax Ethics and Tax Evasion, Evidence from Greece
AUTHORS:
George Drogalas, Evgenia Anagnostopoulou, Michail Pazarskis, Dimitrios Petkopoulos
KEYWORDS:
Tax Ethics, Tax Evasion, Auditing, Accounting, Greece
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.8 No.5,
April
16,
2018
ABSTRACT: Tax evasion involves the deliberate act of
noncompliance to tax legislation and the disregard of tax payments from the
citizens. Moreover, many citizens do not directly violate tax legislation, but
avoid paying taxes by taking advantage the lack of explicit legislation. Along
those lines, tax ethics forms a personal constraint which regulates the way
citizens behave regarding the payment of taxes. The purpose of this paper is to
explore the tax ethics of Greek citizens and to compare them with those of
other countries. In order to compare our results with those of other countries,
we used a questionnaire, developed by Prof. Robert W. McGee, which has been
used as a research instrument in similar studies. Our results show that Greek
citizens do not evade taxes due to potential personal gains but rather because
they believe that the state is incapable of proper allocation of public money
and that the current political and tax system is inefficient or corrupt. In
conclusion, the state has to gain the trust of its citizens in order to
increase tax ethics and tackle tax evasion, by allocating its resources
efficiently and by promoting political transparency.