The Slovak Republic has introduced Soft Warning, a new tool to promote voluntary compliance by contacting Taxpayers with electronics notifications, creating an alert system for business to fulfil legal obligations and nudging behaviour by suggesting improvements that taxpayers can implement.
Soft – warning (SoWa) - it is electronic notification
• Alerts for businesses to fulfil legal obligations
• Notification message sent to taxpayer inbox on the Portal – 1st SoWa was sent in November 2018
• Informal tool - service oriented
Information included in SoWa:
• What, when, how to do (written in easy language for non-professionals)
• Contact in the case of any questions (call centre or tax administrator)
• In notification message includes a link to a document in a pdf format with all information
• Currently we are able to send the same announcement to all taxpayers or to selected group of taxpayers; it means, that we can create group of taxpayers according to the report in our information system e.g. ‘we identified arrears on your tax account’, we are not able to send separate detailed information ‘we identified VAT arrear €900’…
Soft warning – tax arrears
• Sent monthly after end of month
Achievement
• More active monitoring of taxpayers account from taxpayers
• Improvement of communication tax office – taxpayer
Decrease number:
• Tax debtors (4%)
• Written ‘hard warnings’
We compare only number of tax debtors after month-end-closing with number of generated hard warnings later on (monthly). List of debtor changes every month and more sophisticated methodology is needed to calculate the financial impact.
Soft warning – next steps
• To incorporate insight from behavioural science
• Small - zero-cost changes of the existing communications
• Creating behaviourally informed Soft Warnings
• Creating behaviourally informed Hard Warnings
• Using rigorous methods for evaluation - randomised controlled trials (RCTs)
Trust & Compliance
