Informal Taxation in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Taxpayers’ Experiences and Perceptions
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Research in Brief 15
In low-income and post-conflict countries, and particularly in rural areas, citizens often pay a range of ‘taxes’ that differ substantially from statutory policies. These ‘informal taxes’, paid to a variety of state and non-state actors, are frequently overlooked in analyses of local systems of taxation. This is problematic, as it leads to misunderstandings of individual and household tax burdens, as well as of systems of local governance. This is a 2-page brief summary of Working Paper 66 by Samuel Jibao, Wilson Prichard, and Vanessa van den Boogaard.
Samuel Jibao is the Director of the Centre for Economic Research and Capacity Building in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He is also an Assistant Lecturer at the African Tax Institute at the University of Pretoria, and the former Commissioner-General of the National Revenue Authority of Sierra Leone.
Wilson Prichard is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Chair of the Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI) and former Executive Director of the International Centre for Tax and Development (2020-2024). His research focuses on the relationship between taxation and citizen demands for improved governance in Africa.
Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Research Fellow at ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Somalia. Vanessa co-leads ICTD's research programme on informality and tax.
