Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Peter Pierpoint 
Author-Workplace-Name: The Plymouth Business School 
Author-Name: Tim Auburn 
Author-Workplace-Name: The Plymouth Business School 
Title: The psychic costs of tax compliance: nature and implications for policy 
Abstract: A major principle of tax law is that taxes should be equitable in the demands that they place 
	upon the section of the population at which they are aimed. It has been increasingly recognised 
	that the costs incurred over and above the revenue paid to the authorities, as a consequence of 
	compliance with tax law are the significant way in which inequity in the application of taxes comes 
	about. Strong economic cases have been made for the inclusion of such compliance costs as an 
	argument in the tax policy function. 
	Compliance costs have been regarded as having three components: financial, time and "psychic". The 
	financial and time components have been researched for more than fifty years. However, as the state 
	of knowledge about these components of compliance costs has grown so the psychological component has 
	been increasingly neglected. This neglect does not arise from a suggestion that "psychic" costs are 
	unimportant, but rather from a pessimism about the practical means available for their measurement. 
	From an examination of the fiscal literature on "psychic" costs two main factors emerge: an anxiety 
	factor and a resentment factor. Both of these factors constitute negative emotional responses to 
	the fiscal environment of the individual taxpayer. Furthermore, this examination suggests that the 
	application of psychological models and psychological scaling and measurement techniques can go a 
	considerable way toward elaborating the nature of "psychic" costs.

Keywords: Coste psicológico, Cumplimiento tributario.

Length: 26 pages 
Creation-Date: 1987 
Number: 87-17 
X-File-Ref: http://america.sim.ucm.es/repec/ucm/ref/doctra87-17.txt	 
File-URL: https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/21183/1/8717.pdf
File-Format: Application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:ucm:doctra:87-17