This is the final version. Available on open access from the Journal of Tax Administration via the link in this recordIn recent years, tax authorities around the world have started using behavioral insights to
encourage taxpayers to fulfill their obligations. We review and discuss some of the recent
empirical literature on tax compliance. In line with recent trends, we report on a field experiment
in collaboration with the tax authority of Latvia (SRS) to encourage previously non-compliant
individuals, who also have own business income, to submit their tax declarations on time in 2017.
These individuals were pre-emptively sent emails with behaviorally informed messages, in order
to reach and influence an important target population, at a salient moment. Our results indicate
that all the behaviorally informed messages increased submission by the submission deadline,
compared to a control group. The best performer was a message that specifically framed noncompliant behavior as a deliberate choice, which increased timely submission by 9.4% (4.1
percentage points; p=0.05)
