Abstract:

Any actions related to taxation avoidance cause a tax gap. Hence they reduce the tax income of the state, and interrupt its redistribution function. This is reflected in the availability and quality of public goods for citizens, and the scale of tax extortions can hurt the citizens' trust towards the state.

One levy, which is prone to this due to its structure, is the value added tax (VAT). Particular countries undertake different types of actions which are to restrict the pathologies related to this tax. In the case of Poland, this is a particularly significant problem. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the VAT gap in Poland was one of the largest in the member countries. In 2012, it amounted to 27%  (Poniatowski, Bonch-Osmolovskiy, & Belkindas, 2018), while the average for the EU-28 has been calculated at 14.73%.

The purpose of the article is to answer the research question: are the VAT system sealing mechanisms put into operation in Poland effective?