Research and analysis
The role of communications in voluntary compliance
This research explored businesses’ attitudes and behaviours around compliance and their responses to a range of messages.
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Academic research has identified that communications that leverage fairness, deterrence and social norming messages can help promote voluntary compliance.
The overall purpose of this research was to test this hypothesis and identify the types of message that have the most potential to change compliance behaviour and those which lead to customers paying the right tax without HMRC intervention (‘voluntary compliance’).
The research was carried out by Jigsaw Research, and consisted of:
- 75 participants overall, sampled from HMRC administrative data
- 8 focus groups involving 8 participants each
- 11 in-depth interviews with individuals identified as being sole traders, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), and in Pay As You Earn (PAYE) with additional Self Assessment (SA) income in the UK
The findings of this report cover the impact of fairness, deterrence, and social norming messaging on:
- how businesses feel and behave in the tax system
- how businesses perceive themselves within the tax system
- how businesses perceive HMRC
- businesses’ beliefs about the norms in their sector
- businesses’ perceptions of likelihood of detection of non-compliance
- how HMRC can use the results to impact behavioural compliance