Understanding the Demand for Tax Disclosures: A Sociological Perspective
Keywords:
Stop and Search, Demand for Tax Disclosures, Stereotypical Perception and Symbolic Assailants, Risk ProfilingAbstract
The purpose of this study is to understand how tax officers become suspicious and decide to demand disclosures from taxpayers in a developing country, using the context of Ghana. We draw on the concept of police stop and search to uncover some of the cues that inform tax officers’ suspicions and decisions to demand tax disclosures from taxpayers. We used an interpretive qualitative methodology. Data was collected through interviews and publicly available documents. Braun et al.’s (2018) thematic analysis was employed in order to analyse the data. The study’s findings show that risk profiling or assessment, third-party information, informant reporting, awareness of known tax offenders, incongruent tax returns, and an understanding of the economic and political status of taxpayers prompt tax officers to form suspicions and decide to demand tax disclosures. We also observe that the use of these cues can be discriminatory. This study argues that these unfair practices can make taxpayers uncooperative and cause them to lose trust in the tax administration. It contributes to our understanding of social justice and state power in tax revenue administration. It is also original, as no other study seems to have employed the theoretical concept of stop and search in order to understand the demand for tax disclosures in the context of a developing economy.
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