On 18 February, the Chairman of the State Revenue Committee (SRC) Edward Hovhannisyan received UNDP Resident Representative in Armenia Dmitry Mariyasin on the occasion of the completion of his mission in the Republic of Armenia. At the Committee, Armenia SDG Innovation lab team presented results of “On Increasing Tax Compliance through Behavioral Insights: Experimental Evidence from Armenia” the behavioral intervention, which was conducted within the framework of the SRC-UNDP cooperation.
The experiment was carried out in 2019 in cooperation UNDP in Armenia, State Revenue Committee and Armenak Antinyan (Zhongnan University of Economics and Law), and Zareh Asatryan (ZEW Mennheim). The randomized controlled trial was testing the impact of low-cost behavioral interventions on tax compliance in Armenia. We focused on 28,503 small and medium enterprises operating in Armenia who are eligible for paying a turnover tax. We assessed whether behavioral notifications sent through e-mail can increase the total turnover declarations by these companies. We also checked whether increased turnover declarations eventually result in declaring more taxes.
We tested 5 different types of email notifications. We later juxtaposed the results against the control group, which was not exposed to any treatment. This way, we aided the authorities in developing a dialogue with the citizens and changing their perceptions on taxes. The experiment was carried out within the framework of "Innovative Solutions for SDG Implementation in Armenia" project funded by the Russian Federation and implemented in close partnership with the Government of Armenia.
You can find the experiment results on our projects page.