Promotion of Tax Culture and its Impact on Expanding the Tax Umbrella and Identification of New Taxpayers

Regarding the cultural factors affecting tax compliance, there is strong evidence that taxpayers are not just affected by binding legal mechanisms and instruments in various countries. This paper examines the promotion of tax culture and its impact on the expansion of tax umbrella and the identification of new taxpayers. In this research, the factors affecting tax culture have first been identified and ranked using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in the following nine groups: cultural and demographic norms, social values, financial and administrative corruption in the society, the rule of law, tax knowledge, enforcement guarantees, satisfaction of taxpayers and tax officials and the determination of government officials. Then, the impact of factors so identified on the expansion of tax umbrella has been studied. This research has been conducted at the level of experts consisting of university faculty members, tax auditors, and directors of departments at the Iranian National Tax Administration. According to the results obtained, enforcement guarantee, tax knowledge and cultural norms ranked first to third. Also, the sub- criteria of age difference of individuals, improvement of the ethics of employees in each profession, the existence of poverty in society and insufficient prosperity, observance of laws, observance of morality and values, familiarity of individuals with criminal acts, index of public supervision over the spending of tax revenues, taxpayer's perception of an equal application of law, reverence by tax officials, clarification of the law and its efficiency have been scored the highest in the sub-criteria prioritization. The results of the study in regard with the effect of the identified factors on the expansion of tax umbrella showed that cultural norms, social values and levels of financial and administrative corruption had the highest impacts.