ABSTRACT
Tax avoidance schemes often exploit differences between national tax laws. Therefore, national initiatives to fight tax avoidance are increasingly embedded in international efforts. The OECD/G20 base erosion and profit shifting project (BEPS) project, for instance, aims to introduce new standards in international taxation. These include, among others, global models for automatic exchange of information and legal harmonization. This chapter discusses the concept of social representations and introduces a method to define and evaluate social phenomena such as tax avoidance. It explores how fairness perceptions shape the social representations of tax avoidance, tax evasion and tax flight and presents an empirical study on the social representations of taxes and the images of different types of taxpayers. The chapter presents new and unpublished data on taxpayers' social representations of typical taxpayers, honest taxpayers, tax avoiders and tax evaders. It also explains some methods to promote tax compliance such as increasing perceptions of fairness and strengthening social norms.
