Tax Ethics and Tax Evasion, Evidence from Greece

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.