Assessing Ethical Issues in Tax Agencies in Mongolia

Abstract

The primary goal of this study is to assess practices and services provided by tax agencies from an ethical standpoint, to research and evaluate the impact of the ethical problems on supporting businesses, to compare the findings with practices in other public administration agencies and to identify areas for improvement. The findings of the study indicate that: 1) Regarding the suitability of tax services for business environment, it currently looks not very supportive for business entities although it does appear to be average or slightly above average; 2) Six indicators of tax service ethics are carefully examined: knowledge and skills of tax staff; their interpersonal skills and ethics; consistency of rules on corruption and bribery within tax agencies; bureaucracy; and relationships among departments and units. When the data are combined and represented at the national level, in UB city and local population, the findings indicate that tax agencies demonstrate indicators of moderate ethical problems when compared to those of other government bodies across the country; 3) As the impact assessment of the above six indicators implies, interpersonal skills and inter-departmental relationship indicators in tax agencies in UB, knowledge and skills, interpersonal skills, and ethics indicators in the case of local tax agencies demonstrate having impact as the regressive equation suggests; 4) When ethics in tax agencies are thoroughly examined in terms of corruption, bribery and bureaucracy and their nationwide, UB city and local population aggregate distribution are presented, no indicators of corruption and bribery affecting the operations and services of tax agencies are observed; however, as regression equation recommends, a bureaucratic impact is detected.