Willingness to pay taxes through mutual trust: The effect of fairness, governability, tax-enforcement and outsourcing on local tax collection rates

This study extends our understanding about the interrelationship between taxation policy, democracy and financial performance in local governments. Every government, particularly local ones, would like to make their residents more willing to pay taxes. Based on the trend of making local authorities less reliant on national budgets and the ever-increasing expectations that they provide high quality services, we investigated how public perceptions about the local government's fairness, tax enforcement, governability and the outsourcing of local tax collection affect the percentage of local property taxes collected. We used a survey of 607 Israeli residents randomly sampled from municipalities that do and do not outsource, and independent data about tax collection rates. The results indicate that perceptions about tax enforcement and governability mediate the relationship between perceptions about fairness and tax collection rates. However, only within local authorities that outsourced tax collection was there a positive relationship between perceptions about tax enforcement and tax collection rates and a positive relationship between perceptions about governability and tax collection rates. Implications of the findings are discussed in the era of local democracy and local governance.