Personality aspects of tax compliance

Abstract

The knowledge of the relationship between tax compliance and numerous personality traits is limited. Willingness to pay taxes is defined and assessed in abundant ways; studies are mostly limited to the Big Five facets, producing ambiguous and theoretically not sufficiently underpinned results. Therefore, the present study explores the relationships between the Big Five personality traits, HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and the slippery slope model factors of tax compliance to understand who and why is more likely to comply with taxpaying than others.We applied the social dilemma theory as a framework and CFA, OLS linear regression and dominance analysis on the survey data of 350 respondents. We found that HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and Agreeableness affect more factors of tax compliance than the other examined personality traits. We argue that this is because HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and Agreeableness are directly linked to the dilemma of prioritising selfish or prosocial actions. Honesty-Humility seems to relate to almost all factors of tax compliance and, thus, seems to be the most important personal determinant of tax compliance. Our research goes beyond the literature findings, as we found individual effects between personality traits and individual tax compliance factors. Consequently, they do not have a linkage between personality traits and tax compliance as a general phenomenon, but they exert different directions and extents regarding the specific tax compliance factors.