In any economy, the main purpose of the tax system is to provide a solid and stable source of government revenue. On the other hand, a tax system should aim to enable the country’s economic development and support disadvantaged groups. Achieving these objectives should be accompanied by a continuous preoccupation of the tax administration to increase its efficiency. In this process, a particularly important factor consists in reducing the tax evasion, given that it contributes to a diminution in terms of efficiency within the state structures, while being a factor of corruption. Over the past 20 years, in Romania, the presence of tax evasion has reached relatively large dimensions in both the economic area and the underground economy, where the phenomenon is widespread. Taking the road from the particular to the general, distinguishing the legal tax evasion from the fraudulent one, this paper aims to answer the question: Why is it necessary to control the tax evasion phenomenon and how to do this? This question aims at achieving the following objectives: distinguishing between the legal and the fraudulent tax evasion and the methods used by taxpayers to circumvent the tax obligations.

First of all, reaching the objectives was assured by consulting a significant amount of work, that is to say publications of scientific claim, while making use of analysis, induction and deduction, significant volume of quantitative information was examined and submitted to professional reasoning. In literature, there are many Romanian and foreign authors reporting on the tax evasion issue while as far as specialised magazines are concerned, there are just a few discussing about the social protection issues or about the European experience in the tax adjustment whereby the states have gone over the years, such as: the Romanian Economic Journal, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Review of Social Innovation and other authors such as Saguna & Tutungiu (1995), M. Duverger (1965), Carmen Corduneanu (1998), Hoanþã (2000). Research results and general conclusions on the issue of tax evasion in Romania are listed at the end of the paper