Public finance theory suggests that property tax is an ideal local tax. But it’s also a ‘data-hungry’ tax, making it difficult and costly to administer properly— especially at the local government level where capacity, skills and resources are often lacking. Given its high data demands, property tax administration lends itself to the application of modern…
Read moreWith the first implementation of e-filing by the US in 1986, many countries in Europe, Asia and Africa followed suit. E-filing for certain tax payments was introduced at the federal level in Nigeria in 2013. However, none of the State Boards of Internal Revenue in Northwest Nigeria have made the system available for the collection…
Read moreAt their most general, presumptive taxes seek to use indirect means to assess the liability of a specific taxpayer, which differ from the usual rules based on taxpayer accounts. Many countries use some form of presumptive taxation to simplify the rules for businesses and individuals that frequently escape taxation. Ethiopia uses presumptive taxation as a…
Read moreProperty taxes are an important revenue source for subnational governments. Across sub-Saharan Africa collection of property taxes is made up of several distinct processes, some situated at the national level, and some at the local level. Thus, inter-organisational cooperation and institution-based trust are essential for the successful implementation of property taxation. Because of the common…
Read moreTax revenue administration in Uganda went through a series of reforms from 1991–2014, with the height of these reforms occurring from 2004–2014. These reforms achieved a lot of improvement in the quality of tax administrators’ service delivery, tax compliance and revenue collection. However, in contrast with some other countries that implemented somewhat similar reforms, the…
Read moreInterest is growing in taxing small-scale traders in developing countries in both the academic literature and the policy arena. This interest is due to the large and often growing portion of small-scale businesses in many developing economies, which is eroding their formal tax bases. Zimbabwe is slowly, but increasingly taxing this sector. In 2005 the…
Read moreIn recent years, one of the most important developments in African tax administration has been the widespread adoption of value added tax (VAT). A key feature of VAT is its self-enforcement mechanism, which incentivises buyers to request a receipt and claim refunds on VAT paid. This should in principle go against the seller’s incentive to…
Read moreAfrican revenue authorities developed a growing interest in tax education as a key driver of compliance and in the context of a modern approach to tax administration (Mascagni and Santoro, 2018). Indeed, poor tax knowledge has a number of potentially serious implications. Firstly, it is likely to affect compliance. On the one hand, uninformed taxpayers…
Read moreProperty tax is tax charged on real estates or immovable assets. The tax base may be on land only, land and improvements on the land, or improvements on the land only. For the purpose of this paper property tax shall be referred to as tax on all types of immovable properties, residential, commercial and industrial,…
Read moreThis ICTD Research in Brief is a two-page summary of ICTD Working paper 89 by Marius Siebert and Anna Mbise. Are taxation systems in Africa biased against women? This is a hard question to answer and there is very little literature on the topic. Gender biases of personal income tax systems in developed countries have been well…
Read moreTax collection has historically – in Africa and elsewhere – been collected almost entirely by men, partly reflecting patterns of authority and privilege in society, and partly owing to the traditionally coercive and confrontational approaches used. The situation is changing, with women entering the profession in increasing numbers, in part because of changes in the…
Read moreThis ICTD Research in Brief is a two-page summary of ICTD Working paper 87 by Vanessa van den Boogaard. This series is aimed at policy makers, tax administrators, fellow researchers and anyone else who is big on interest and short on time. In recent years, activists and policy-oriented researchers have begun to explore how tax…
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