An Investigation into the Effective Factors in the Increase in the Citizen's Willingness to Pay Municipality Taxes

Considering the maximum share of the taxes in the different incoming sources of municipalities, attempts should be made to collect such share based on legal frameworks. One of the important factors lending itself to a thorough study is the investigation of the behavior of the taxpayers and citizens in relation to the issue of paying taxes. The cooperation and participation of the citizens in paying their taxes would enable the urban management to take efficient measures to optimally finance and provide local services, to invest in the public infrastructures, etc. The experts state that in order to increase the citizens’ willingness to pay their taxes, such strategies and methods as running advertising projects and passing some motivation- raising rules like offering the possibility to pay taxes on installment plan and considering some form of rewards for encouraging the citizens to pay taxes are of great feasibility. This study investigates into the economic, social, and legal factors which are effective in the citizens’ willingness to pay their taxes in the municipality of the district 21 of Tehran municipality. The current study has been carried out at two levels of population including the staff at the municipality of the district 21 and the citizens in this district and the researcher, after determining the size of the sample for each of the groups, using the SPSS, has analyzed and probed his tripartite theories and the results show that economic and social factors affect the citizens’ willingness to pay their taxes to the municipality from among which the legal factor had the least effect.