Part 1 - AL-Tax

International Taxation Handbookthat there is never or almost never a duty to pay taxes because the government isa thief, nothing more than a band of organized criminals, and there is no duty togive anything to criminals. The third view is that there is some ethical obligationto support the government of the country where you live but that duty is less thanabsolute.One of the most comprehensive analyses of the ethics of tax evasion was doneby Martin Crowe (1944), who examined the theological and philosophical literatureof the last 500 years. Much of this literature took the always unethical or sometimesunethical positions. McGee (1994) discussed and summarized the Crowe study.A more recent work by McGee (1998a) included the opinions of more than 20scholars who, collectively, espouse all three viewpoints. The Torgler (2003) studyis also comprehensive, although Torgler looked at both ethical and public financeaspects of the issue.A number of studies have been done that examine tax evasion in a particularcountry. Vaguine (1998) examined Russia, as did Preobragenskaya and McGee(2004) to a lesser extent. Smatrakalev (1998) discussed the ethics of tax evasion inBulgaria. Ballas and Tsoukas (1998) discussed the views of Greek taxpayers. McGee(1999e) conducted a series of interviews to determine how people in Armeniathink about tax evasion. McGee and Maranjyan (2006) did a follow-up empiricalstudy to determine the views of economics and theology students on the ethics oftax evasion. Surveys have also been conducted of Chinese business and economicsstudents (McGee and Yuhua, 2006), Chinese law, business and philosophy students(McGee and Guo, 2006), and accounting, business and economics students in HongKong (McGee and Ho, 2006), as well as international business professors (McGee,2005a), Romanian business students (McGee, 2005b), and Guatemalan businessand law students (McGee and Lingle, 2005). Morales (1998) discussed the viewpointof Mexican workers. Most of these studies found that taxpayers do not have anethical problem with evading taxes because their governments are corrupt and theyfeel that they have no ethical duty to pay taxes to a corrupt government. Moralesconcluded that a Mexican worker’s duty to his family is sometimes more importantthan his duty to the state.A number of studies have discussed the ethics of tax evasion from a practitionerperspective. Such studies tend to focus on the accounting profession’s ethicalcode rather than any philosophical concepts. Two studies that take a practitioner’sperspective were those of Armstrong and Robison (1998) and Oliva (1998).If the articles by Cohn (1998) and Tamari (1998) are representative of the Jewishview, one may say that the Jewish view is near absolutist. Because Cohn is anOrthodox rabbi and Tamari is a well-known and highly respected Jewish scholar,294