12/26/2023 0 Comments Those who remain script 2021While interventions evaluating the effect of different messages have become very common, differences coming from the selection of the communication channel remain an understudied mechanism. 2013 Del Carpio 2013 Hallsworth 2014 Castro and Scartascini 2015 Perez-Truglia and Troiano 2018). Messages appealing to moral considerations such as shaming, fairness, and social norms have mixed results (Blumenthal et al. Messages that increase the salience of penalties and audits are effective for increasing tax payments with results that are in line with the predictions from the standard deterrence model of tax evasion (Slemrod et al. Most of the field experiments to increase tax compliance and reduce delinquencies have focused on the content of the messages sent to taxpayers (Slemrod 2018 Antinyan and Asatryan 2020). Moreover, high tax delinquencies erode the reputation and the ability of the agency to handle its mission effectively. Finding ways to reduce delinquencies is paramount for both fiscal and equity considerations. In Colombia, the National Accountant Office estimated the total outstanding debt to the National Tax Agency DIAN in $2.5 billion, which represents around 20 percent of the total tax evasion in 2014. According to an estimate by the United States Treasury Department, Americans failed to pay about $110 billion, or around 25 percent of the estimate of the total amount underpaid in 2006 (Perez-Truglia and Troiano 2018). Tax delinquencies are a major problem for most tax administrations in the world. They also indicate that personal interactions are important, but they have to be paired with easy-to-follow and immediate actions. The findings complement a nascent literature that shows that there are plenty of gains from innovating in the communication strategy. However, many taxpayers who commit do not make payment effective. Faced with a tax agent, taxpayers tend to commit to attending the meeting and paying the tax owed. We also find suggestive evidence that the personal interaction seems to be an important channel for explaining taxpayers’ behavior. Conditional on the phone call being made, the effect on the treatment is about 25 percentage points higher than the control group (about a fivefold increase). Phone calls were very effective to increase collection of unpaid taxes. DIAN randomly assigned 34,000 tax debtors to a phone call operation using a fixed script to communicate existing debts and invite taxpayers to a meeting at the local tax agency office. This paper reports the results of a field experiment conducted by the National Tax Agency of Colombia (DIAN), using phone calls to reduce tax delinquencies. Still, other technologies exist that could be more effective. Most tax agencies use letters as the method of communicating with taxpayers.
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