Moral Motivation and Trainingin the Islamic Tax System

One of the outstanding aspects in Islamic taxes such as Khums and Zakat is the use of a voluntary system for motivation, calculation and payment. In contrast, conventional taxes mainly use a control-incentive framework for tax compliance. Using an analytical approach, the current paper evaluates the plausibility of the two tax systems by asking whether we could use control and incentive polices in the Islamic tax system, as it is used in the conventional tax system. I hypothesize that morality plays an important role in the Islamic tax system and use of control and incentives might produce problems such as intrinsic motivation crowding out effect and weakening the moral training capacity of Islamic taxes. According to the findings of the paper, the use of sever control policies and conventional incentive polices affect moral incentives for tax payments in two ways. The control policies erode self-esteem and incentive polices change the mentality of agents about exchange market for tax payment. It seems that the efforts of Islam to expand the system of self declaration, the consumption of taxes in place in which they have been collected, flexible tax rates, the necessity of good intention during paying taxes and emphasis on training aspects of the tax, shows that Islam has been aware of the negative effects of control and incentive polices on tax morale.