Benchmarking Tax Compliance Efficiency Among South African Retail Firms Using Stochastic Frontier Approach

Random selection of taxpayers for audit mostly nets tax compliant taxpayers. There is hence a need to adopt other methods that are efficient and and effective in performing their specific and general deterrence roles. This article uses profit efficiency benchmarking to analyze selected retail firms tax compliance risk in South Africa over the 2005–2006 period. It seeks to identify firms that should be audited because of their suspected tax compliance risk, using a stochastic frontier analysis. The profit efficiency estimates of 24 retail stores are used to rank them in terms of their performance. They are also tracked over time. Approximately, 50 percent of the firms performed better than the average profit efficiency of 0.39. The top 10 firms are significantly performing better. However, the bottom 50 percent of the retail firms performed poorly and could be targeted for tax audit.