Taxation Compliance and Administrative Costs : An Overview

This chapter considers key aspects of that literature. It starts (in Section 2) by explaining what is usually meant by the term “operating costs” and discussing some of the conceptual issues that arise. It then reviews (in Section 3) the research that has taken place on this topic, including recent European Union research, and identifies (in Section 4) the key outcomes of that research. The following part (Section 5) explores some of the principal reasons for the high and regressive compliance costs that research has shown have been a feature of modern tax systems, and the final section begins to suggest some of the means through which the operating costs of the tax system can be addressed and, hopefully, reduced