Fiscal awarenessa study of the female attitude towards fraud in Spain

Abstract

Our paper studies fiscal awareness in Spain, with a particular focus on the attitude towards tax fraud among the female population. The reason is that women seem to constitute a social group with a specific behaviour in several aspects. We use unexploited data, based on a survey carried out in October of 2007 among the Spanish population by the Fiscal Observatory o the University of Murcia. A total of 29 questions have been posed to 1500 adults, concerning the fiscal awareness of the citizens, their tax morale, their knowledge of the fiscal system, their perception of fiscal efficiency and fiscal fraud, along with socio-economic characteristics of the respondents. The relevant information is extracted from this survey by the way of microeconometric models. More specifically, we use discrete choice models. Given our objective, special emphasis is put on the gender variable and on how it can alter the impact of other variables. For this purpose, we use several interaction variables, obtained by multiplying the gender dummy variable with other independent variables, such as education or the labour situation, among others. Another novelty of our study consists of introducing in the study the cultural dimension of fraud: we allow the individual's attitude towards fraud to depend on the general attitude of the surrounding society towards it. A third novelty refers to taken explicitly into account the knowledge (both subjective and actual) of the main fiscal norms. Our results indicate mainly four facts. Firstly, the level of education in general and the knowledge of fiscal norms are important determinants of the individual's declared attitude towards fraud. Secondly, the societal rejection of fraud definitely and strongly influences the individual attitude towards it. Thirdly, women are less sensitive to the societal rejection of fraud making them on average somewhat more tolerant towards fraud although, fourthly, a higher level of family income drastically reduces the female tolerance towards fraud.