Drivers behind tax non-compliance
On Friday 26 April 2024 Thomas Lange will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
The drivers behind tax non-compliance are diverse. They range from conscious withholding of taxable income and assets to unconscious errors made in the effort of trying to comply with complex declaration standards.
This PhD-thesis aims to understand tax compliance and non-compliance from three different perspectives: The employees, the managers and, finally, the firm.
The first paper studies the compliance effects of corruption and armed conflict in the country of origin among labour immigrants. There are associations between conflict exposure prior to migration, and a reduction in the probability of compliance up to 9.9 percent. Compliance is significantly higher for those with residence time between 5 and 10 years than for those with residence time of more than 10 years. There are no clear effects of corruption level in the home country.
The second paper use two different machine learning algorithms to identify drivers of tax compliance among firm managers. There is a negative association between manager compliance and armed conflict exposure in their workforce. Older managers are less inclined to be compliant, likely due to a learning effect of both tax system loopholes and audit frequency. Use of external accountant and a salary system increase compliance. Again, there is no effect of home country corruption level.
The third paper compares the effect of audits and information letters on the firms’ payroll tax remittance. Both treatments have a positive effect on tax compliance. An audit immediately increases the average firm’s payroll tax remittance by 48.14 percent more than the non-treated firm, whereas the corresponding figure for the letter treatment is 13.54 percent. The audit effect sustains two years post-treatment, but the letter effect declines after one year.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
Problems in estimating the extent and determinants of tax evasion - and microeconometric approaches to overcome these problems
Trial lecture:
Aud. M NHH, 10:15
Title of the thesis:
«The Effects of Labour Migration and Interventions on Tax Compliance».
Defense:
Aud. M, NHH, 12:15
Members of the evaluation committee:
Associate Professor Øyvind Thomassen (leader of the committee), Department of Business and Management Science, NHH
Professor Robert Ullmann, Augsburg University
Professor Kaisa Kotakorpi, Tampere University
Supervisors:
Professor Evelina Gavrilova-Zoutman (main supervisor), Department of Business and Management Science, NHH
Associate Professor Floris Zoutman, Department of Business and Management Science, NHH Utreder PhD Anne May Melsom, Proba Samfunnsanalyse
The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.