Mobilizing domestic revenues efficientlyis a priority for the Government of Poland, but it is noteasy. There are numerous instruments that can be used toachieve this objective. Traditional measures to boostgovernment revenues include changes to the tax legislationand reforms in the area of tax administration. Such measurescan have a large fiscal impact, but are often politicallychallenging to design and negotiate, and can take time toimplement. Behavioral interventions often focus on adaptingexisting systems and processes and can thus be implementedrelatively quickly and at a low cost. Overall, they are anadditional tool in the policy toolkit that countryauthorities have to improve tax compliance, and thuscomplement but do not substitute traditional measures toestablish effective tax collection systems including changesin tax legislations and tax administration reforms.Behavioral interventions can also help the Tax Authority toalign its strategy more accurately to taxpayer behavior. ThePolish authorities were interested in applying insights frombehavioral economics to their communications with taxpayersto see if making small changes could promote tax compliance.This paper summarizes the results of a randomized controlledtrial (RCT) that used letters to remind taxpayers in Polandto pay their taxes. These taxpayers had declared theirpersonal income tax (PIT) for the 2015 fiscal year but hadfailed to pay what they owed by the deadline, April 30, 2016(i.e., taxpayers in arrears). The trial took place betweenMay and August 2016 and covered a total of 149,925individual taxpayers.
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