Studying the Relationship between Social Capital and Tax Culture (Case Study: Tax Payers in the West Cities of Mazandaran Province)

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of social capital on tax culture in the western cities of Mazandaran province. The research method was a survey and the data were collected by a questionnaire. All donations referring to the Tax Office of the cities of Noshahr and Chalus have been selected as the statistical population, which is 24500 according to the statistics of 2018 of whom 400 people were chosen through the stratified sampling method and based on the Cochran formula. The findings show that the average social capital and tax culture are more than the average. There is a positive and direct relationship between the amount of social capital and the tax culture; the greater the social capital, the greater the willingness of taxpayers to pay taxes. Also, there is a positive and direct relationship between the three dimensions of social capital and the individual and organizational dimensions of tax culture. Multivariate regression results show that 69.2 percent of tax rate changes are explained by social capital, and sociological capital has had a greater impact on tax culture. Therefore, in order to strengthen and promote the tax culture, attention to social capital, and in particular cognitive social capital, is necessary to reduce the tax evasion among the taxpayers.