Abstract
This article considers non-compliance with tax legislation by self-employed professionals, using qualitative data on the tax compliance attitudes of lawyers and dentists in Kenya. The main argument is that corruption and inadequate service delivery, over which the revenue authority has no control, lower tax morale and limit the effectiveness of trust in the authority in increasing voluntary compliance. It is further argued that, under such circumstances, stringent detection and enforcement measures would be more helpful in enhancing these taxpayers’ compliance. This research contributes to the literature on the slippery slope framework on trust and power; most of the empirical work on the framework derives from countries with lower levels of corruption and better public service delivery than most African countries. Thus, this article enhances the understanding of the relationship between trust and power in the context of tax compliance among professionals in Kenya and provides some beneficial insight that may be relevant for other African countries.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 113-125 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Intertax |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 28 Feb 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author is a British Academy-funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford University Faculty of Law and a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. This research would not have been possible without the respondents who were generous with their time and willing to share their experience with remarkable candour; I am incredibly grateful to them. Various aspects of this work were presented at the following conferences and workshops: Addis Ababa (November 2015), Oxford (September 2016), Oxford (June 2018), Kigali (February 2019), and Munich (November 2020). I am very grateful for the comments I received from the participants in those forums. I am also extremely grateful for the comments and suggestions received from Prof Lynne Oats, Prof Glen Loutzenhiser, and Prof Naomi Creutzfeldt. Finally, I express my gratitude to the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT), and the Oxford Law Faculty for the financial support that facilitated this work. Email: daisy.ogembo@law.ox.ac.uk.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Kluwer Law International BV, The Netherlands
Keywords
- Africa
- Audits
- Cooperative compliance
- Corruption
- Kenya
- Power
- Slippery slope framework
- Tax administration
- Tax evasion
- Trust
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Accounting
- Law