It is estimated, that between 2015 and 2024 about 3 trillion € will be inherited in Germany. Due to far-reaching tax exemptions, the inheritance tax revenue per year is only about 7 billion €. Despite the fact, that the income or value-added tax burden is significantly higher, the inheritance tax is more unpopular than other taxes. The objective of the paper is to figure out, whether there is evidence of high tax evasion in the field of German inheritance tax, with a view to the low tax revenue and the high unpopularity of the tax. Therefore, data from the official inheritance tax statistic is compared with secondary data from studies, which estimate the yearly wealth transfer to the next generation by using survey data. The assumption is, that asset classes, which are easy to evade, should be recorded with a lower amount in the official tax statistic, than in the survey-based estimations. But the results do not show evidence of high tax evasion in the field of inheritance tax. As until now, only a small part of the inheritances is recorded in the official inheritance tax statistic, for the future it is recommended to the government, to record all inheritances in the official statistic. Because of far-reaching reporting obligations, the tax offices anyway have knowledge of most inheritances and the additional bureaucratic effort to record the additional data in the official tax statistic is small.

The objective of the paper is to investigate the influence of the inheritance tax on the amount of tax evasion in different countries. The inheritance tax is among the most unpopular taxes. It is assumed, that unpopular taxes, such as the inheritance tax, have a measurable influence on the amount of tax evasion. Countries that levy inheritance taxes and countries which don’t levy inheritance taxes are compared in their success in fighting the shadow economy over a longer period (1991 – 2017). For that, data from Medina and Schneider from 2019 about the development of the shadow economy and from the OECD about the inheritance tax revenue is used. The approach is, to find dependencies between the inheritance tax revenue and the size of the shadow economy. The results show, that countries which abolished the inheritance tax, are not anymore that successful in fighting tax evasion than they were before. There is also evidence, that countries with a relatively high inheritance tax revenue are not able to fight tax evasion to the same extent, as countries that levy relatively low inheritance taxes. Therefore, in terms of reducing tax evasion, it is not recommended to abolish already introduced inheritance taxes, but rather to continue levying a moderate inheritance tax.