On Wednesday, 31 countries formally agreed to support and implement one of the main recommendations put forward by the OECD to reduce tax avoidance by transnational corporations, the BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) recommendations. This major initiative has been somewhat sidelined by media hype around Google tax payments. Have OECD governments missed the opportunity for more substantial…
In the past decades, the evolution of international norms has led fair labour practices and environmental sustainability to become core parts of corporate social responsibility. Is fair tax contribution next? How do international norms come to be? In the late 1990s, international relations scholars Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink developed a theory for how ideas develop…
The official launch of the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) Government Revenue Dataset September 9, 2014, Center for Global Development (CGD), Washington DC Speech by Claudia Dziobek, Division Chief, Government Finance Statistics** – IMF Let me begin by thanking the ICTD and the CGD for organising this event and for inviting us to participate. We at the…
There’s surprising news from Antalya, where the G20 leaders met last weekend. The meeting was obviously dominated by immediate crises dramatised by the terrorist attack in Paris and the continuing drama of mass refugee movements. They nevertheless found time to discuss, among other issues, a new legal framework to curb international tax avoidance by multinational…
Two years on from a project triggered by scrutiny of the “successful” tax avoidance structures of multinationals such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, the OECD has delivered its final package of reforms on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS). Is the BEPS project a success? The answer is as elusive as the answer to the classic question “is the…
The Centre for Economic Research and Capacity Building (CERCB), just concluded a week-long regional dialogue workshops, where findings on recent surveys on ‘taxpayers’ perceptions’, and ‘informal taxation’ in post-conflict Sierra Leone, were shared. The dialogue workshops were held in June/July 2014, in seven (7) district headquarters, where the surveys were conducted. This was under the…
What are property taxes? Broadly, they are taxes on the ownership, occupation or legal transfer of land and buildings. They take many forms, and go under many different names. The most familiar are regular annual charges payable by the owners or occupiers of urban residential or commercial premises. In Britain we call this the Council Tax….
Highlights of the Updated GRD – Contains new government revenue data until 2012 and in many cases, 2013. – Better coverage – more data from sources means (Better disaggregation, more countries where we can isolate resource revenues and new observations – e.g. South Sudan. – Includes the System of National Accounting and base year used by…
The report of the Senate Economics References Committee inquiry into corporate tax avoidance comes with the subtitle – “You cannot tax what you cannot see”, with a strong focus on increased transparency. The majority of the 17 recommendations in the interim report relate to improved transparency of the tax affairs of corporate taxpayers. This is a significant…
While developing countries have acknowledged the importance of domestic resource mobilization in development, in practice, not enough attention is being paid to the importance of tax bargains. Attempting to increase tax-to-GDP ratios without promoting negotiations between the taxing authorities and those being taxed is bound to undermine sustainable tax collection and promote poor governance. Successful…
When an international development conference in Addis Ababa almost collapsed last week, the confrontation emerged from an obscure and unlikely source. Who knew that the status of the UN Tax Committee could so stir the emotions? After taking negotiations to the brink, the G77 group of developing countries climbed down on demands for a global tax body and the rich countries got their…
A new study shows that Value-Added-Tax can be used to educate people outside the reach of direct income taxation on their role as tax-paying citizens. Improved tax compliance could be the outcome. As aid continues to dwindle day after day, raising domestic tax revenues is increasingly becoming an important priority for most African countries. Raising…
