Strengthening tax compliance by implementing behavioural insights for revenue administration in Belgium, Austria, and Portugal

The project provides technical support to the revenue administrations of Austria, Belgium and Portugal for strengthening tax compliance by implementation of tools and technics based on behavioural insights. Behavioural science focuses on human behaviour and decision-making processes. In the context of tax compliance, it can be used to support policy interventions and the capacity of tax administrations, contributing to institutional, administrative, and growth-sustaining structural reforms.

The project is still ongoing until August 2026.

Context

Tax evasion and late tax payments are systemic problems across all Member States. As individual tax arrears are frequently small debts spread across a significant number of individuals, the collection of such tax arrears creates a high administrative burden for revenue administrations since it is time- and resource-intensive. To increase rates of voluntary compliance, the tax administrations of Austria, Belgium and Portugal are looking to develop and implement new tools that provide real time compliance data across segments of taxpayers to help them design targeted interventions based on behavioural Insights (BI). Some tax administrations have run BI-inspired pilot projects and have begun to build more expertise in this field. However, in most cases BI are not consistently applied and fully integrated into the daily work of the tax administrations.

Support Delivered

The technical support will build the capacity and help the beneficiary authorities in implementation of BI by producing the following deliverables:

• Methodological handbook on behavioural insights for tax compliance.
• Analytical report of the current situation regarding BI in each participating Member State.
• Training materials and training sessions on BI for each participating Member State.
• Communication strategy and communication materials on BI.
• Technical report for survey on opinions, attitudes, trust levels and motivations for tax compliance.
• Technical report on BI field study implementation.
• Technical report with IT specifications for a compliance dashboard.
• Knowledge database on BI tools for tax compliance.

Results achieved

The project aims at achieving the following specific objectives:

• Identify relevant for each country BI interventions based on analysis of the current situation in each country, and international best practices.
• Improve the knowledge and capacities of the tax authorities to implement BI interventions for strengthening tax compliance.
• Implement as a pilot BI intervention to test them in practice and improve the approach.
• Increase the awareness among key stakeholders and the public of the BI tools and the results derived from their use. 
• Implement a digital dashboard for monitoring the behaviour of different segments of taxpayers and reinforce a customer-oriented approach.