The principal aim of this paper is to examine the experience of pre-filling in Australia. Section Two provides a background discussion of pre-filling in Australia. Section Three presents a preliminary assessment of the impact of pre-filling and considers a number of proposals that could enhance...

This article suggests that the proposals for a standard deduction for work related expenses and the costs of managing tax affairs of individual taxpayers, due to be introduced from 1 July 2012, are flawed from a number of perspectives. After briefly reviewing international practice and examining...

Despite being consistently stated as an important characteristic of good tax policy, tax simplicity has largely been ignored in actual tax reform. After so many years and attempts, the goal of tax simplification in Australia appears to be as elusive as ever. The central tenets of this paper are...

Tax compliance inevitably requires taxpayers to incur costs, often significant, to fulfill their tax obligations. This paper reports on the tax compliance burden of Australian personal taxpayers in the 2011-12 tax year, using the refined Sandford methodology. The scope of the study is confined...

This paper addresses an identified gap in knowledge about whether, and how, perceptions of corruption may influence personal income taxpayer compliance behaviour. It examines how perceptions of five forms of corruption may impact upon intentional tax underreporting behaviour by adopting a...

Tax non-compliance and perceptions of corruption are key challenges to state-building in developing countries. Using a social psychology approach, we develop a theoretical model in which different forms of perceived corruption can adversely influence the way individual taxpayers behave. We then...

Firms in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector have to contend not just with the burden of tax. They also have to comply with obligations imposed by the tax system. Studies invariably show such tax compliance costs to be high and regressive. This article reports on a recent large-scale...

This article considers the tax compliance costs incurred by the large corporate sector. Using a survey of large and very large businesses and international groups in Australia, and drawing on the findings of other studies, the authors compare and contrast the current burden with the burden...