Taxpayer Education and Rights: Evidence from Ghana

Last registered on January 06, 2025

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Taxpayer Education and Rights: Evidence from Ghana
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0015079
Initial registration date
January 04, 2025

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
January 06, 2025, 12:44 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Harvard University

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Harvard University
PI Affiliation
Harvard University
PI Affiliation
International Growth Center
PI Affiliation
Boston University

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2024-08-08
End date
2025-04-01
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Pilot study on taxpayer education and property taxes conducted from August to November 2024 in an urban municipality in the Greater Accra Region, Ghana. The study encompasses two closely connected tax collection experiments. These two experiments build on a common intervention component: an in-depth education campaign on property taxation received by a subset of taxpayers and tax collectors, respectively. The educational program focuses on the institutional details of property taxes, the tax collection process, and rights and responsibilities of taxpayers. The first experiment creates exogenous pairings between tax collectors and taxpayers with differing combinations of education treatment status. The second experiment focuses on the tax collection process in equilibrium with experimental arms varying both the education status and the collector's salience of taxpayer education. We focus on three main outcomes: (i) immediate outcomes of the education program on knowledge, (ii) intermediate outcomes on collector-taxpayer interactions, (iii) and final outcomes on tax registration and payment. Different potential mechanisms will be considered.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Dzansi, James et al. 2025. "Taxpayer Education and Rights: Evidence from Ghana." AEA RCT Registry. January 06. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.15079-1.0
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
The education intervention consisted of three parts.

First part: Information provision
The first part was the provision of a limited amount of information on the property taxpayer’s rights and responsibilities. This information was provided to all households assigned to the treatment at the time of the baseline survey. The information was provided to each treated household by the enumerator, who had been hired by the survey firm working in collaboration with the research team. The enumerator delivered the information at the very end of the baseline survey, and was only informed of the treatment status of the household after having completed the survey and just prior to delivering the information to the treated household. Prior to conducting the baseline survey, enumerators were trained in delivering the information script; at the end of the training, each enumerator had to satisfactorily answer questions in a quiz about the content of the information script. The information provided is attached as a supplementary document to the pre-analysis plan.

Second part: Workshop event
The second part of the education intervention was a workshop event. At the time of being delivered the information during the baseline survey, each treated household was informed about the upcoming workshop event. In each wave, the workshop event took place prior to the date when collectors began working in the units. In each wave, multiple workshops were organized on different days and at different times, to accommodate for individuals’ availability. A few days prior to the first workshop, treated households were reminded of the dates and times of the set of events. Treated households were also informed they would be provided a small amount of money, upon attending the event, to cover transportation costs to the event location.

At the event, an independent tax expert delivered an interactive lecture on the rights and responsibilities of taxpayers. The content in the lecture covered the same topics as in the provided information, but in greater detail. In addition, the lecture simulated ‘cases’ of real-life scenarios, where a property taxpayer is interacting with a tax collector and is faced with a specific request or demand by the collector. The content of the lecture is provided as a supplementary document to the pre-analysis plan.

Third part: Hotline
Finally, the third part of the intervention was the creation of a hotline number. This number was delivered to each treated household at the same time as the information provision during baseline survey. The treated household was informed that they could call this number at any time, if they had follow up questions about rights and responsibilities of a property taxpayer. A member of our research team was in charge of answering the calls from the hotline number.

A script was provided to guide the conversation. In a first attempt, the research team member would attempt to provide information to the caller’s question on the basis of a manual with content. If the research team member could not provide an answer, a consultation would take place with the independent tax expert. After consultation, a follow up call would be placed with the household to provide the complete answer to their initial question. Importantly, the script emphasized that additional information could be provided to the caller, including on next steps to complete a required process, but no actual assistance in completing any process was provided. For example, if a caller had a question about appealing their property tax liability, the hotline provides information on the next steps in the appeal but offers no actual assistance in drafting the required documents and letters to trigger the appeal process.
Intervention Start Date
2024-09-09
Intervention End Date
2024-10-20

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
1. Immediate outcomes of the education program on knowledge
2. Intermediate outcomes on collector-taxpayer interactions
3. Final outcomes on tax registration and payment
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Experiment 1:
This experiment took place in a dedicated geographic subset of the tax collectors’ assigned collection unit. For one week—in waves 1 and 2 respectively—the tax collector is given a small number of specific properties in a subset of their collection unit that they have to visit for tax collection purposes. The small number of properties and protocol instructed to the collector ensure that the collector-taxpayer interactions are not endogenously selected by the collector.

Given the treatment status of the taxpayer and the collector, this experiment creates four collector-taxpayer pairs:
– Control taxpayer, control tax collector;
– Taxpayer who received education program, control tax collector;
– Control taxpayer, tax collector who received education program;
– Taxpayer and tax collector who both received the education program.

Experiment 2:
This experiment took place in the full geographic collection units assigned to the tax collector. For each of the waves 1 and 2, this experiment lasted three weeks.
Every collection unit was assigned to one of four experimental arms:
– CG: No property owner received the educational program, assigned tax collector did not receive the educational program;
– TG1: 50% of the surveyed property owners (or person otherwise in charge of the property tax) received the educational program, assigned tax collector did not receive the educational program;
– TG2: TG1 + collector informed about 2 geographic areas within the unit that have a high share of property owners that received the educational program;
– TG3: TG2 + assigned collector received the analogous education program.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Randomization done in office by a computer
Randomization Unit
- Collection units were randomly assigned to the 4 treatment groups in experiment 2
- Collectors were randomly assigned to the collection units
- Within the collection units, 50% of surveyed households in treatment groups 1-3 (TG1, TG2, TG3) were randomly assigned to the treatment status of the unit (i.e. received the education program) and the remaining 50% to the control group
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
2 clusters of collection units (above/below the median property values of the pairs)
Sample size: planned number of observations
- 24 collection unit pairs (i.e. 48 separate collection units) - 24 collectors -1250 households (including the two collection units that were dropped from the study prior to the collection campaign and collector randomization)
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
For collection unit pairs and collectors, n(TG1)=7, n(TG2)=5, n(TG3)=8, n(CG)=5
Each collection unit will have roughly 25 households surveyed, which equals about 1250 households (in total, across the two waves)
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Dummy for any tax payment made by taxpayer: mean of 0.39 with a standard deviation of 0.18
Supporting Documents and Materials

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IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Harvard University-Area Committee on the Use of Human Subjects
IRB Approval Date
2024-08-20
IRB Approval Number
IRB24-1119
Analysis Plan

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