Abstract

Defined as any action to reduce payment of legitimate taxes by circumventing the intent and goals of tax law, aggressive tax avoidance erodes public services, exacerbates societal inequality, and reduces public confidence in government. While significant research explores the impact of aggressive tax avoidance from empirical and normative perspectives, there is a need for a further understanding of how aggressive tax avoidance practices shape and are shaped by social values, norms, and ethical commitments. This manuscript uses moral economy as a framework to identify these forces and their impact on various stakeholders. Moral economy is a values-based system of economic interactions that arise from collectively held fair and equitable notions of economic behavior. Moral economy does not make aggressive tax avoidance illegal, which remains the province of the state. However, moral economy has the potential to encourage social condemnation of aggressive tax avoidance that would increase the social and economic costs of the practice. Moral economy can thus contribute to the deterrent forces discouraging aggressive tax avoidance and thus make it less acceptable as a method for circumventing payment of obligations to the government.