Understanding Motivations of Tax Compliance Behaviour: Role of Religiosity and Tax Knowledge

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to enhance the understanding of taxpayers’ motivations to comply with tax rules in a developing country like Yemen. Intrinsic motivations, such as religiosity and knowledge can play an important role in driving taxpayers to engage in compliance with tax authorities’ laws and regulations. Therefore, in this study, the effect of these internal factors on tax compliance has been examined. A cross-sectional approach has been utilized through a self-administered survey managed by individual taxpayers in Yemen to collect from 287 individual taxpayers. Multiple regression was employed to examine the relationship between variables of this study. The results show that taxpayers’ compliance is negatively related to the level of religiosity, while positively influenced by knowledge of taxpayers. This paper provides significant insights for tax authorities and policymakers in developing countries, and in Yemen particularly, to provide more arguments to taxpayers about the importance of payment of tax, by adopting and deploying the perspectives of the Islamic scholars that have a positive perception about tax. Furthermore, tax authorities are advised to concentrate on enhancing citizens’ tax knowledge which will lead to improvement in their compliance behaviour.