Abstract:
Tax compliance is said to be the heart of the healthy functioning of societies. This makes understanding it an important topic in economics. The general objective of this study was to find out how personal factors affect tax compliance among university students in Kenya and To determine the effects of age on tax compliance, how a taxpayer attitude affects to tax compliance and to determine how the knowledge level on tax affects tax compliance. The significance of the study to the researchers was that it would help them to determine the relationship between attitude, age and knowledge level on tax of individuals towards tax compliance. This study looked into personal factors affecting tax compliance amongst university students in Kenya. The research focused on Riara University in Nairobi, Kenya. The research was aimed at ascertaining whether the personal factors in this case, Attitude, knowledge level on tax and Age do indeed affect tax compliance amongst the target group.
The scope of the study was to establish how personal factors affect a university student’s tax compliance in Kenya. The researchers therefore focused on personal factors which are age, attitude and knowledge level on tax paying to try to establish how all these personal factors encourage tax compliance. In this study the researchers adopted the fiscal illusion theory to try and elaborate on this. The theory of Fiscal illusion states that when government revenues are not completely transparent the government’s cost is seen to be less expensive than it is this is because taxpayer benefits from government expenditure from inconspicuous revenues therefore heightening their need for government expenditure hence laying a ground for politicians inducement to enlarge the government s size.The type of research design that was used is the exploratory study design that was adopted as it is prone towards the loosing of the structures and attempt to highlighting areas for future research. Questionnaires were used for data collection because it’s cheap, the study will employ pie charts to analyze the data collected from the research. The population under study was approximated to be one hundred and twenty students (120) at Riara University, mostly aged eighteen (18) years and above. The sampling technique used was the stratified random sampling.
