Stakeholders’ Engagement as A Strategy Toward Optimizing Voluntary Tax Compliance: A Case Study of The Nigerian Tax Administration
Authors: Ogungbesan Sunday Samuel 
Published: June 2024

Governments across the globe depend on sustainable revenue sources to fund their country’s development. This goal requires citizens to declare their income honestly and pay taxes to support the government’s socio-economic programs; as such,the government has a responsibility to demonstrate accountability and transparency in the utilization of tax monies and in fulfilling its social obligations to its citizens. The continuous failure of the government to provide citizens with basic social services tends to exacerbate the trend of tax non-compliance, as citizens would generally overlook the constitutional tax provisions, which require them to pay taxes based on the annual statutory income declaration.This is the general practice in Nigeria, where the level of tax compliance with the self-assessment regime is below 40% (Onyegbule, 2011).Citizen stend to become non-compliant with tax obligations when they cannot see the link between taxes and services that are meant to be enjoyed by them. With the current ineffective compliance and enforcement policies and strategies implemented in past years, the trend of tax non-compliance continues to get worse; hence, this paper advocates the adoption of stakeholders’ engagement strategy to promote voluntary tax compliance. The study adopts mixed methods research, primarily using the qualitative, interpretive method, on the one hand, and quantitative research method, which uses a survey/questionnaire that was administered to 1.170 subjects who participated in the study. Both approaches are aimed at investigating the role of stakeholders’ engagement in tax administration, and to what extent the strategy can positively influence voluntary tax compliance.By definition, stakeholder engagement is the process by which an organization communicates and gets to know its stakeholders, and getting to know the people who might be affected by the decisions it makes,or can influence the implementation of its decisions. The study gathered data from the study participants using qualitative research tools, such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys/questionnaires with structured questions addressing the subject of tax non-compliance and stakeholder engagement generally. The data were processed through descriptive/inferential statistical analysis (quantitative), and thematic analysis, which helped immensely to find common trends and patterns in producing appropriate themes that helped to answer the research questions. The qualitative findings were triangulated with the quantitative results to control the researcher’s bias and to cover likely deficiencies of one single approach, thus increasing the validity and reliability of the results. The findings and results suggested that stakeholders’ engagement as a strategy is appropriate and relevant in strengthening tax administration and should be embraced by all tax authorities in their respective jurisdictions to optimize voluntary tax compliance. The study concluded that stakeholders’ engagement is a vital catalyst for promoting voluntary tax compliance, with the potential to enhance tax awareness, elicit a positive tax-paying culture among the citizens, and increase the level of tax collection, thus improving countries’ tax/GDP ratio.