This week, Doron Narotzki (Akron; Google Scholar) reviews Robert W. McGee (Fayetteville State University), Bahadir Yuzbasi (Inonu University), Ökkes Kisa (Inonu University) & Serkan Benk (Inonu University), The Role of Emotions in Attitudes Toward Ethics of Tax Evasion: An Empirical Study, 10 Int’l J. Pub. Fin. 325 (2025).
McGee, Yuzbası, Kısa, and Benk offer a very interesting scholarship for many of us in the tax world by examining a narrow but important question: whether the emotional experience of paying taxes is associated with the way taxpayers judge the ethics of tax evasion. The article’s contribution is conceptual as much as it is empirical. Rather than treating compliance as a function of audits, penalties, or the traditional concept of “tax morale,” it targets ethical appraisal as a distinct attitudinal construct that may plausibly mediate between institutional perceptions and real-world evasion decisions. The authors measure ethical judgments using an eighteen-item “ethics of tax evasion” questionnaire and assess affect using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).
The theoretical setup is organized around four ethical perspectives: an absolutist view that evasion is inherently unethical; an anarchist view that the state lacks legitimacy, making evasion morally permissible; a conditional view that turns on contextual factors such as corruption, unfairness, or rights violations; and a fourth view that treats evasion as potentially a moral imperative in extreme circumstances. This typology is a strength because it recognizes that people can judge tax evasion differently in different situations, and it keeps the analysis from treating “ethics” as one vague, sort of a catch-all attitude.
The article’s methodology is straightforward. The authors survey individual taxpayers (sole proprietorships) in Malatya, Türkiye, selected because unlimited personal liability plausibly intensifies the emotional salience of paying taxes. They distributed 600 questionnaires and obtained 464 valid responses (78% response rate). The sample is predominantly male (85.6%), and the authors appropriately signal caution about generalizability, especially to larger metropolitan contexts.
Descriptively, respondents display a baseline opposition to evasion. The average score across all eighteen ethics statements is 2.70 on a nine-point scale, and internal consistency is high. Yet the distribution across justifications is revealing and consistent with the article’s “conditional” framework. The highest-mean items include government discrimination based on religion, race, or ethnicity, imprisonment for political opinions, and corruption by politicians or their associates. Conversely, evasion is least accepted where public spending is perceived to benefit the respondent. This pattern matters because it suggests the dependent variable is not noise; respondents discriminate sharply among justificatory contexts, anchoring the study in recognizable normative intuitions about legitimacy and reciprocity.
The authors test their idea with two basic statistical models. In the first, taxpayers who reported more positive feelings when paying taxes were much more likely to say that tax evasion is unethical. In the second, taxpayers who reported more negative feelings were more likely to view tax evasion as ethically permissible. The positive-emotion result is stronger than the negative-emotion result. The authors therefore suggest that tax authorities should focus on improving the taxpayer experience, including public messaging about the social value of taxes and administrative reforms that increase transparency and perceived fairness, while also reducing negative reactions linked to perceptions of corruption or unfair treatment.
The main limitation I see is that the study shows correlations at a single point in time, so it cannot prove that emotions cause people to change their ethical views about tax evasion. Ethical beliefs could shape reported emotions (for example, those who view paying taxes as a civic duty may report pride), and both could be downstream of institutional trust, perceived fairness, or personal financial stress. Because the models explain only part of what shapes people’s views, other important factors not measured in the study are likely also influencing the results. The article also notes a measurement limitation: PANAS captures general positive and negative affect but may not capture taxation-specific emotional nuances.
A natural next step would be to broaden the analysis by adding measures of perceived fairness, perceived corruption, trust in tax authorities, and financial stress, and by using a research design that can better test cause and effect. The results might also look different with a more gender-balanced sample, given that this study is heavily male. Future work could also use simple experiments, for example, changing how tax authorities communicate transparency or public benefits, to see whether that shifts people’s moral views about evasion. Another approach would be to follow the same taxpayers over time, especially around filing and payment periods, to see whether changes in their emotional experience track changes in their ethical judgments. Even with its limits, the article offers clear evidence that emotions felt during taxpaying are closely tied to how taxpayers judge the ethics of evasion, and that tolerance for evasion rises most in scenarios framed as government injustice or corruption.
Here is the rest of this week’s SSRN Tax Roundup:
David R. Agrawal (UC Irvine), Jeff Bjarke (Tennessee Dept. Revenue) & William F. Fox (Tennessee, C. Bus. Admin.), Telework and Local Tax Performance: Work-From-Home and What, How, and Where We Consume
Victor de Andrade Gurgel (Independent), Digital VAT Reporting Failures: Why the Issue Usually Starts in the System, Not in Tax
Samina Ashraf (U. Punjab), Fighting for Fair Taxes: How the Federal Tax Ombudsperson and Traditional Judiciary Stand Up for Taxpayers
Bradley T. Borden (Brooklyn), A Critical Analysis of Alternative Section 1031 Proximate-Exchange Structures, 22 U.C. Law S.F. Bus. L.J. 81 (2025)
Thomas Davidoff (U. British Columbia, Sauder Sch. Bus.), Policy Forum: Foreign Buyers and Local Housing Affordability—Indications from Vancouver, 73 Canadian Tax J. 505 (2025)
Frederik Dhondt (Research Group CORE (Contextual Rsch. L.); Legal Hist. Inst./Gustave Rolin Jaequemyns Inst. Int’l L. (GRILI)), Jurisdiction and Taxation in the Habsburg Netherlands: The Manuscripts of Goswin Arnould de Wynants, Emperor Charles VI’s Belgian Councillor, Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor de Uitgave der Oude Wetten en Verordeningen van België—Bulletin de la Commission Royale pour la Publication des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances de Belgique LIX, at 231 (2025)
Brian D. Galle (UC Berkeley), David Gamage (Missouri), Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) & Darien Shanske (UC Davis), Expert Report on Valuation of Controlling Shares of Publicly Traded Companies Under the California Billionaire Tax Act (CBTA), U. Missouri Sch. L. Legal Stud. Rsch. Paper No. 2026-04
Jim Y. Huang (Toronto), Fiscal Geometry for Global Capital Markets: Rendering Cross-Border Tax, Audit, and Valuation Gates on the X-Y Plane
Richard Krever (U. Western Australia), Kerrie Sadiq (Queensland U. Tech., Sch. Accountancy) & Na Li (Inst. Austrian & Int’l Tax L., Vienna U. Econ. & Bus. (WU)), Australian Tax Treaty Policy: The Dilemma of a Wealthy Capital-Importing Nation
Li Liu (IMF), Alexander Klemm (IMF) & Parijat Lal (World Bank), Shaping Services Trade: The Heterogeneous Effects of Withholding Taxes
Michael H. Lubetsky (McMillan LLP), Unproven Allegations of Dishonesty, Wilful Blindness, or Gross Negligence: The Case for Cost Consequences in the Tax Court of Canada, 73 Canadian Tax J. 467 (2025)
Orly Mazur (SMU), Policy Options to Address the “Robot Threat,” in Taxation of Data and Artificial Intelligence (Xavier Oberson & Alara Efsun Yazıcıoğlu eds., forthcoming 2026)
Naoya Mori (Kobe U.) & Haruka Amma (Kobe U.), Revisiting the Implicit-Explicit Tax Framework: Neutrality and Perfect Substitutability
Chris Noonan (U. Auckland) & Victoria Plekhanova (U. Auckland), Digital Services Taxes, Tariffs, and Subsidies, 73 Canadian Tax J. 427 (2025)
Obinna Onyishi (Independent), Digital Finance Reform in Nigeria: Opportunities, Risks, and the Road Ahead for Crypto Regulators and Businesses
Samantha J. Prince (Penn State), Nest Eggs and Lifelines: The Overlooked Strain of Economic Volatility on 401(k) Participants
Mansi S. Rai (N.Y. State Dept. Tax’n & Fin.; U. Rochester, Simon Bus. Sch.), The False Divide Between Finance and Compliance: Reframing Compliance as the Execution Layer of Financial Decision-Making
Joao Dacio Rolim (Brazilian Inst. Tax L. (IBDT)) & Lucas Esteves Borges (Independent), Legal Analysis of the Incentives of the Low-Carbon Hydrogen Legal Framework in Brazil and Its Compatibility with the Rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
Wolfgang Schoen (Max Planck Inst. Tax L. & Pub. Fin., Dept. Bus. & Tax L.), Tariffs and the International Tax Order, Working Paper Max Planck Inst. Tax L & Pub. Fin. No. 2026-01
Pramod Kumar Siva (Texas A&M), Citing the Unseen: AI Hallucinations in Tax and Legal Practice a Comparative Analysis of Professional Responsibility, Procedural Legitimacy, and Sanctions
Sartono Suwarno (U. Pancasila), Darmansyah Darmansyah (U. Pancasila), Syahril Djaddang (U. Pancasila) & Suratno Suratno (U. Pancasila), Integrated Reporting and Using Artificial Intelligent (AI) into Good Corporate Governance: Implications for Transparency Financial Report and Sustainable Accountability
Simon Vercoe (Independent), The Decimal-Percentile Tax—A Novel and Structural Overhaul of Existing Tax Systems
