What determines the justifiability for accepting bribes and cheating on taxes?

Aniza Zahoor, Imran Qaiser, Nazia Yasmin and Ayesha Asif

Journal of Financial Crime, 2023, vol. 30, issue 6, 1706-1719

Abstract: Purpose - Corruption prevails in societies and systems, but it is because of the individuals and officials who practice it. It is individuals’ characteristics, attitudes, views and choices that spur them to act ethically or not. This study aims to investigate whether beliefs, values and behavior vary across countries in perspective of bribery and tax cheating. Design/methodology/approach - This study used Order Logistic Regression on microlevel data from World Values Survey wave VI (2010–2014) for 58 countries to find factors of tax cheating and accepting bribes. Findings - This study revealed some interesting findings while comparing upper-income countries and lower- and middle-income countries. Justifiability for accepting bribe is negatively affected by age, patriotism, interest in politics, university education while positively affected by employment and income. Justifiability for cheating on taxes is negatively affected by confidence in justice system, interest in politics and marital status while positively affected by income, patriotism, confidence in political parties and good health. This study finds some valuable insights to the policymakers to device policy to overcome financial corruption and its acceptability in the masses. Originality/value - This paper fills the literature gap by adding a wide range of variables related to demography, socioeconomic status, trust on political, judicial and government institutes, well-being, patriotism and religiosity. Moreover, this paper compares the behaviors of a wide range of countries that include both developed and developing economies.

Keywords: Tax cheating; Bribery; World Values Survey; Ordered logistic regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:jfcpps:jfc-09-2022-0214

DOI: 10.1108/JFC-09-2022-0214

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Financial Crime is currently edited by Dr Li Hong Xing and Prof Barry Rider

More articles in Journal of Financial Crime from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().