Onu Diana, Oats Lynne
Tax Administration Research Centre, Business School, University of Exeter, Streatham Court, Rennes Drive, Exeter, EX4 4ST UK.
J Bus Ethics. 2018;149(4):931-944. doi: 10.1007/s10551-016-3032-y. Epub 2016 Feb 19.
We present an analysis of over 400 comments about complying with tax obligations extracted from online discussion forums for freelancers. While the topics investigated by much of the literature on taxpayer behaviour are theory driven, we aimed to explore the universe of online discussions about tax in order to extract those topics that are most relevant to taxpayers. The forum discussions were subjected to a qualitative thematic analysis, and we present a model of the 'universe' of tax as reflected in taxpayer discussions. The model comprises several main actors (tax laws, tax authority, tax practitioners, and the taxpayer's social network) and describes the multiple ways in which they relate to taxpayers' behaviour. We also conduct a more focused analysis to show that the majority of taxpayers seem unconcerned with many of the variables that have been the focus of tax behaviour research (e.g. audits, penalties, etc.), and that most people are motivated to be compliant and are more concerned with to comply than to comply. Moreover, we discuss how these 'real-world' tax discussions question common assumptions in the study of tax behaviour and how they inform our understanding of business ethics more generally.
我们对从自由职业者在线讨论论坛中提取的400多条关于履行纳税义务的评论进行了分析。虽然许多关于纳税人行为的文献所研究的主题是由理论驱动的，但我们旨在探索关于税收的在线讨论的整体情况，以便提取那些与纳税人最相关的主题。我们对论坛讨论进行了定性的主题分析，并呈现了一个在纳税人讨论中所反映出的税收“整体情况”模型。该模型包含几个主要角色（税法、税务机关、税务从业者以及纳税人的社交网络），并描述了它们与纳税人行为相关的多种方式。我们还进行了更有针对性的分析，以表明大多数纳税人似乎对许多一直是税收行为研究重点的变量（如审计、处罚等）并不关心，而且大多数人有遵守规定的动机，并且更关心如何遵守规定而不是为什么要遵守规定。此外，我们讨论了这些“现实世界”的税收讨论如何质疑税收行为研究中的常见假设，以及它们如何更广泛地增进我们对商业道德的理解。
