Tax compliance and tax complexity in Portugal: Essays on the perception of tax professional

This thesis aims to understand the perception of tax professionals in Portugal (TOCs), regarding tax compliance and tax complexity. To this end, three essays are presented. The first essay reports a literature review of tax noncompliance. We verify that there are two main lines of research relating to tax noncompliance - firstly, we have studies which try to explain tax noncompliance and taxpayers' attitudes towards taxation, and secondly, we find those research that are seeking to quantify it. The second essay presents a literature review of the role that tax professionals play in the areas of tax complexity and tax noncompliance. According to the literature, tax professionals tend to use their tax knowledge to solve problems caused by tax complexity, which results in an increase in tax compliance. However, in more complex situations, they have a propensity to use their knowledge of the tax system to take advantage of fiscal complexity in benefits of their clients. The third essay characterizes Portuguese tax professionals and their perception of tax system complexity and its relation with their tax compliance. This essay presents results based on a survey applied to Portuguese tax professionals (TOCs), in 2013. TOCs perceived the Portuguese tax system to contain a high level of fiscal complexity, suggesting that it could have a negative relation with their performance concerning to their compliance tasks. We can also conclude that there are a relation among TOCs' perception of tax system complexity, their tax knowledge index, and their index of legislative tax complexity. Moreover, gender, the index of legislative tax complexity and the perception of tax complexity may explain some non-aggressive tax noncompliant behaviour of Portuguese tax professionals. Moreover, the professionals' age and their standard of tax morality, the index of legislative complexity and their fear of losing customers are the variables that most explain the tax aggressiveness of tax professionals in Portugal. These results show that the perception of tax complexity can influence tax professionals' attitudes towards tax compliance in Portugal.