Understanding Tax Evasion and Professionalism of Tax Administration in Kosovo

Tax administration is the key governmental institution that is responsible for creating, maintaining, and implementing tax policies, which should be suitable for tax administration and for taxpayers. Despite willingness of tax administration to have effective tax compliance, tax inspectors are finding irregularities during tax auditing visits and those irregularities appear as a result of lack of knowledge, technical mistakes and as a result of purposeful tax evasion and tax avoidance. Tax avoidance and tax evasion as phenomena are appearing mostly in developing countries. The research focused on understanding perception of taxpayers on decision of Kosovo government to abolish taxpayers that did not pay taxes in the period 1999-2008 and to understand taxpayer perception on professionalism of tax inspectors and on tax procedures that are implemented in Kosovo. Research concluded that tax amnesty did not have any impact on businesses and in Kosovo market, and while tax inspectors behave professionally during TAK auditing visits, tax avoidance occurs regardless professionalism of TAK staff and regardless of level of satisfaction of taxpayers. Research provided four recommendations for TAK that are related to: capacity building for TAK staff, increase in electronic services for taxpayers, awareness that tax evasion and tax avoidance occurs mainly in developing countries, and positive impact of tax amnesties in fighting informality. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)