Who is More Honest in Tax Declaration Decisions, the Guilty or the Ashamed?

Abstract

This work is to find the differences in tax compliance between two categories of people: the guilty and the ashamed. We divided the participants of tax payment experiments into different categories by a questionnaire, analyzing the data of the experiments. Results indicate that the ashamed exhibit a higher level of tax compliance than the guilty do with no public good and unaware of peer behavior. Additionally, we analyzed the reaction to public goods and peer behavior. Thus, the analysis indicates more discoveries: (1) the guilty improve the level of compliance under the mechanism of returning public goods linearly but decline when receiving fixed public goods; (2) returning public goods has no significant effect on the ashamed; (3) the guilty perform herd behavior following peer compliance; (4) peer behavior on tax compliance has little effect on the ashamed.