Research in Brief 118

Governments in low-income countries struggle to collect and use population information adequately. For tax administrations, all of which require comprehensive data about the tax base, the lack of accurate information is a crucial challenge. This challenge often appears intractable for African tax administrations, which operate in a context of high informality. Cross-agency data-sharing agreements and inter-institutional system integration, primarily related to national identification (ID) schemes, seem to offer a solution. These can potentially improve registration functions, facilitate identification of evaders, increase efficiency, and reduce taxpayers’ compliance costs. Summary of ICTD African Tax Administration Paper 35.

Authors

Celeste Scarpini

Celeste Scarpini is a Research Officer at the ICTD, and a PhD student at the Department of Economics, University of Sussex. Her main research interests relate to tax administration in sub-Saharan Africa, from technology adoption to data management and revenue collection strategies.

Fabrizio Santoro

Fabrizio is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and the Research Lead for the second component of the ICTD's DIGITAX Research Programme. His main research interests relate to governance, public finance, and taxation, with a strong focus on impact evaluation methodologies and statistical analysis. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex.

Ronald Waiswa

Ronald Waiswa is a Research and Policy Analysis Supervisor at the Uganda Revenue Authority. He has collaborated with the ICTD on a number of research projects in Uganda on issues including taxing wealthy individuals and public sector agencies.

Moyo Arewa

Moyo is the Programme Director for the Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI). He was previously the Manager for Strategic Initiatives at (ICTD) and, before then, a Policy Development Officer at the City of Toronto. His tax research has focused on understanding how new technologies impact tax policy, administration, and public service delivery.

Jane Nabuyondo

Jane Nabuyondo is a supervisor for Business Intelligence with 15 years of experience in tax administration and vast knowledge of government (public) operations. She is also the team lead in development and maintenance of the URA Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence solution, including overseeing the implementation of data governance initiatives in URA that will support the organisation to become a data driven entity.
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