Attitude and responsibility of accounting professional members in preventing i̇nformal economy: Case of Kütahya

The informal economy has become an international problem of developed and developing countries from the past to the present. Informal economy includes legal or illegal economic activities which are not included in official records that occur outside the state. This situation causes the loss of taxes, which are the most important source of income and power of the state, in sizes that cannot be ignored. It also leads to the punishment of taxpayers who pay or try to pay their taxes, and affects their moral values. Therefore, the reasons for the informal economy should be identified and the methods of struggling with the informal economy should be determined. The support of all relevant institutions and organizations is needed in order to be successful. The most important support will undoubtedly be the accounting professionals who serve as a bridge between the state and taxpayers. Because accounting professionals have a universal and critical position in preventing the informal economy, the focus has been on the tasks related to preventing the informal economy. In this study, a survey was conducted to demonstrate the contributions of certified general accountancy, certified public accountant and sworn-in certified public accountan in Kütahya (city center) to the prevention of informal economy, to do research whether those contributions differred according to gender, status, age, educational and occupational status, and seniority of the members of the accounting profession, and also to analyze their suggestions of solutions, opinions and thoughts through the studies in the literature. "T test" and "one-way Anova analysis" were applied to analyze the survey. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the contribution of accounting professionals in preventing the informal economy according to gender status, age variable, educational status, professional title, professional seniority did not have certain differences depending on these variables. Keywords: Accounting Professionals, İnformal Economy, Kutahya