Ethics of Tax Evasion: Evidence from Self-employed Tax-payers' of Dessie Town Administration, Ethiopia

摘要

Tax evasion in most developing countries is so widespread and development is much exacerbate by the fact that not many of these countries have made an effort to measure the ethical reasons that taxpayers give. This study, therefore, is designed to describe the ethics tax evasion in Dessie town administration, Ethiopia by taking evidence from 336 randomly selected self-employed taxpayers through a 7 point likert scale questionnaire. Accordingly, this study result shows that tax evasion is ethical in certain situations, and sometimes it is unethical in some other situations. The top mean score ranked arguments that taxpayers gave to justify tax evasion include government corruption, unfair tax system, government discrimination against political affiliation, tax un-affordability, when the money collected is wasted, and high tax rate. In contrary, tax evasion is not ethical when most of the money collected is spent wisely, if the money collected is spent on worthy projects, when the money collected is spent on projects that do benefit taxpayers, and when the money collected is spent on projects that do not benefit taxpayers. The other finding of this study is that the ethics of tax evasion is different among gender, as well as over academic status of the respondents. Females oppose tax evasion than male i.e. females are more ethical than male. Likewise, educated are more ethical than uneducated, this is with the view that tax evasion is unethical. In general, the overall finding of this study indicated that the government should aware the taxpayers that there is proper administration, fair tax system and money collected are spent wisely.