Control of Corruption, Trust in Government, and Voluntary Tax Compliance in South-West, Nigeria

Tax payers’ level of compliance behaviour is a major concern to government and tax authorities. Constant losses of tax revenue through bribery, corruption, and abuse of power for personal advantage are perceived to have adversely affected nation’s economic growth and infrastructural development. Many researches have been conducted on taxpayers’ compliance, but not many considered the effect of Control of Corruption (COC) in their study. This study looked at the probable influence of COC on individual taxpayers’ voluntary tax compliance behaviour in South-West, Nigeria. Survey research design was adopted for the study. Population for the study was 5,216,422 individual taxpayers in three selected states. A validated questionnaire was used to collect data from respondents by means of Stratified and random sampling techniques with a sample size of 1,200 and this gives a response rate of 87.6%. The reliability test using Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranged from 0.79 to 0.86. The study adopts descriptive and inferential statistics to analyze the data at 0.05 level of significance. The study shows that COC positively influenced voluntary tax compliance among individual taxpayers in the study states (Adj. R² = 0.063, F_{(6, 1050)} = 12.68, p = 0.000). There was evidence that trust in government, COC, and employment status have significant relationship with voluntary tax compliance behaviour in the study states (β = 0.139, t₍₁₀₄₄₎ = 6.125, p = 0.000, β = 0.154, t₍₁₀₄₄₎ = 5.025, p = 0.000, β = -0.237, t₍₁₀₄₄₎ = -3.562, p = 0.00) while gender, age, and educational level do not have significant relationship with voluntary tax compliance (β = 0.036, t₍₁₀₄₄₎ = 0.664, p = 0.664, β = -0.002, t₍₁₀₄₄₎ = -0.080, p = 0.936, β = 0.035, t₍₁₀₄₄₎ = 1.081, p = 0.280), respectively. The study concluded that control of corruption influenced individual voluntary tax compliance. Government should put better stiff strategies in controlling corruption on tax matters, overhaul the internal control mechanism, establish state anti-graft agencies, and put stiff punishment for any fraudulent activity on tax revenue generation while zero tolerance to corruption should be seen and practice.