Personality Aspects of Tax Compliance Behaviour

Abstract

Thanks to the famous slippery slope theory, a wide range of factors influencing tax compliance behaviour have been studied in numerous papers. Still, the knowledge on the relationship between these factors and personality traits is limited. Studies mainly concentrated on the Big Five traits and assessed tax compliance behaviour as a phenomenon. The present study, by applying CFA and OLS linear regression on the survey data of 350 respondents, explores the relationships between the Big Five personality traits, HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and the influencing elements of tax compliance behaviour to understand who and why is more likely to evade taxes than others. We found that HEXACO Honesty-Humility, Machiavellianism, and Agreeableness affect more elements of the tax evasion behaviour 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 individual or prosocial values and duties. Honesty-Humility seems to relate to almost all aspects of tax evasion and, thus, to be the most important determinant of tax compliance behaviour.

Keywords: TAXPAYER compliance, FIVE-factor model of personality, Honesty, MACHIAVELLIANISM (Psychology), TAX evasion