Are Individuals More Willing to Lie to a Computer or a Human? Evidence from a Tax Compliance Setting

Ethan LaMothe () and Donna Bobek ()
Additional contact information
Ethan LaMothe: Oklahoma State University
Donna Bobek: University of South Carolina

Journal of Business Ethics, 2020, vol. 167, issue 2, No 2, 157-180

Abstract: Abstract Individuals are increasingly switching from hiring tax professionals to prepare their tax returns to self-filing with tax software, yet there is little research about how interacting with tax software influences compliance decisions. Using an experiment, we examine the effect of preparation method, tax software versus tax professional, on willingness to lie. Results from a structural equation model based on data collected from 211 actual taxpayers confirm the hypotheses and show individuals are more willing to lie to tax software than a human tax professional. Our results also suggest this effect is jointly mediated by perceptions of social presence and the perceived detectability of the lie. Beyond the practical implications for tax enforcement, our findings broadly contribute to accounting and other literatures by examining the theoretical mechanisms that explain why individuals interact differently with computers versus humans. We also extend prior research on interactions between humans and computers by examining economically motivated lies.

Keywords: Human–computer interactions; Willingness to lie; Social presence; Tax compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-019-04408-0 Abstract (text/html)
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:kap:jbuset:v:167:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s10551-019-04408-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-019-04408-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().