COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF EFFICIENCY OF GREEK TAX OFFICES OPERATING WITHIN TOURIST AREAS

The assessment of a highly complex service, like public administration, should be approached by a cautious and objective methodology. The aim of this paper is to study the technical efficiency of a set of tax offices in Greece operating within tourist areas during the period 2001-2006. Window analysis was used to detect efficiency trends and stability over time; In addition, tobit analysis was applied to explain the inefficiency obtained from the Data Envelopment Analysis results. A DEA-Bootstrap approach was also applied in order to validate the stability of the DEA-derived estimations. The results indicate that the synthesis of the status of taxpaying population influence tax office inefficiency. Legal entities are better equipped to organize their financial activities and to comply with the legal taxation framework. The 'large city' in which a tax office operates contributes to its performance. This could indicate operational 'well being' and can be attributed to internal as well as external factors linked to the infrastructural robustness that is present in large urban areas. Increased tax revenues in relation to the gross domestic product in its region of responsibility limit its inefficiency, since the regional economic growth appears to go hand in hand with the taxed incomes and therefore the collected tax revenues. The efficiency estimation of the tax offices aims to provide tailor-made political and administrative measures that can lead to improvements in the overall performance of those offices and the general infrastructure behind the tax office system in Greece.