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- Blog
- 22nd Nov 2013
Behavioural Insights Tax Trials Win Civil Service Award
Last night, at the UK Government’s Civil Service Awards, the tax trials that we ran with HMRC won the Innovation award. The trials involved rewriting tax reminder letters to incorporate behavioural economics principles, and testing these against controls. BIT and HMRC were able to show how these simple, cost-free interventions…
- Person
Dr Michael Hallsworth
Dr Michael Hallsworth is Managing Director of BIT Americas. Before his current role, Michael led BIT's global work on health and tax for five years. Michael was previously a Senior Policy Advisor in the Cabinet Office of the UK government and has in-depth experience of both policy development and service…
- Academic publication
- 1st Mar 2014
The Behavioralist As Tax Collector: Using Natural Field Experiments to Enhance Tax Compliance
Tax collection problems date back to the earliest recorded history of mankind. This paper begins with a simple theoretical construct of paying (rather than declaring) taxes, which we argue has been an overlooked aspect of tax compliance.
- Person
Dr Alex Gyani
Alex is the Director of the Behavioural Insights Team's Australian office. He has been based in Sydney since 2014. Previously Alex oversaw the team’s research and evaluation work across Singapore, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and ran the office in Aotearoa New Zealand from 2018-2021. Since joining the team in…
- Academic publication
- 23rd Apr 2015
The use of field experiments to increase tax compliance
Governments have become increasingly interested in the ‘explosion’ of research into taxpayer behaviour. This article briefly reviews two main theories of tax compliance (‘deterrence’ and ‘non-deterrence’), before discussing the recent rapid rise of natural field experiments (NFEs) in this area.
- Blog
- 2nd Mar 2016
Tax lotteries and Behavioural Insights in Europe
Last week, the European Commission published a report on the growing uptake of behavioural insights across the governments of Europe. You can read the report here. One of the most interesting parts of the paper is on the growing use of tax lotteries in European countries. Lotteries or prize draws…
- Blog
- 18th Mar 2016
Sugar tax: how will it affect behaviour?
One of the most striking announcements in this week’s UK budget was the introduction of a new ‘soft drinks levy’ (quickly dubbed the sugar tax), which will come into force in 2018. New taxes aren’t usually associated with the Behavioural Insights Team - partly because BIT’s preference is to find…
- Academic publication
- 15th Jun 2016
Behavioral Interventions in Tax Compliance: Evidence from Guatemala
This paper presents results from a large (43,387) nationwide randomized controlled trial in Guatemala that used reminders to promote tax compliance.
- Academic publication
- 21st Jun 2016
Casting the Tax Net Wider: Experimental Evidence from Costa Rica
The majority of firms in developing countries are informal, and encouraging them to register with the tax authority has proven challenging and costly.
- Blog
- 22nd Sep 2016
Increasing tax payments in Costa Rica
Over the past few years, BIT has implemented a number of successful trials using letters to remind people to pay their taxes. In March 2015, we ran our first trial in Costa Rica. In this case we tested sending emails - an even lower cost intervention than letters. Working with…
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