Tax Administration and Compliance
Many of the challenges low-income countries face in mobilising domestic resources are related to tax administration as much as tax policy. Our research on this theme encompasses all aspects of tax administration, from technology adoption, to data management and strategies for collecting revenue from different types of taxpayers. Tax compliance is a key focus, as low-income countries struggle with widespread evasion, corruption, and limited administrative capacity. Our research on compliance includes survey-based studies of taxpayers’ perceptions and attitudes, case studies, and large-scale field experiments.
Publications:
Most research on tax compliance, including research on gender differences in compliance, is based on one of two problematic sources of data. One is surveys enquiring about attitudes and beliefs about taxpaying, or actual taxpaying behaviour. The other is experiments in which people who may or may not have experience of paying different types of…
This paper uses administrative data from Value Added Tax (VAT) returns to provide insights on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Rwanda. We show that the lockdown in Rwanda had a severe impact on the domestic economy, despite relatively low case numbers. However, the economy quickly rebounded after restrictions were lifted, with overall sales…
In early 2016 the Rwanda Revenue Authority sent messages to 9,000 taxpayers, aimed to encourage compliance. Each taxpayer was randomly allocated to a treatment group, or to a control group that received no message. Treatment messages varied in terms of content (deterrence, fiscal exchange, reminder) and delivery method (letter, email, SMS). Our RCT evaluates the…
The value added tax (VAT) is supposed to be a tax on consumption that achieves greater economic efficiency than alternative indirect taxes. It is also meant to facilitate enforcement through the ‘self-enforcing mechanism’ – based on opposed incentives for buyers and sellers, and because of the paper trail it creates. Being a rather sophisticated tax,…
Taxpayers sometimes engage in complex transactions with uncertain tax treatment, such as mergers, acquisitions, demergers and spin-offs. With the rise of global value chains and proliferation of multinational corporations, these transactions increasingly involve transnational financial arrangements and cross-border dealings, making tax treatment even more uncertain. If improperly structured, such transactions could have costly tax consequences….
This note uses administrative tax data for formal firms to measure the direct impact of lockdown restrictions on firms’ profitability, employment, and exit rates. The authors separate the economy into three categories, according to the size of the shock experienced, and consider two lockdown scenarios: one lasting three months and one lasting five months. These…
Tax amnesties have taken centre stage as a compliance tool in recent years. The OECD estimates that since 2009 tax amnesties in 40 jurisdictions have resulted in the collection of an additional €102 billion in tax revenue. A number of African countries have introduced tax amnesties in the last decade, including Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa…
Like several other revenue administrations, prior to the introduction of the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool (TADAT) in Uganda, there was no comprehensive standard tool for assessing revenue administration against internationally recognised good practices. Detailed assessment was spread across different facets of revenue administration and indicators were not standardised. The first TADAT assessment of Uganda’s…
Many Sub-Saharan African countries, characterised by government budget deficits, have been undergoing reforms and improvements to enhance tax revenue collection. However, such improvements often fall short of expectations and do not yield the expected revenue. These economies are highly vulnerable to tax avoidance and tax evasion, mainly due to the lack of a strong, modernised…
National tax administrations in sub-Saharan Africa have undergone considerable reform in recent decades. In several respects, they are, on average, more reformed and more efficient than tax administrations in other low-income regions. Many have made major organisational changes, responding effectively to a number of major challenges. This includes the introduction of VAT, a rather complex…
Blogs:
What is the connection between taxation and more open societies that the British aid programme aims to support? In long-term historical perspective, it is very close. The societies that enjoy the most open, democratic and accountable government are also those that tax the most – and spend the most on making life better for their…
Informal economies in North Africa have frequently captured public attention in recent years. They not only make up over half of the region’s labour force and a substantive part of its GDP, but often put workers into unsafe environments or in conflict with authorities. While Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation is surely the most famous example, deaths and…
It is widely recognised that “business as usual” will not close the estimated financing gap of USD 2.5 trillion that is needed annually to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. United by this realisation, the members of the multi-stakeholder-partnership Addis Tax Initiative (ATI) recently presented the ATI Declaration 2025 to renew political buy-in…
Research Projects:
VAT is a key revenue generating tax in Zimbabwe and all African states. It is also a key source of financing of the African countries budget. VAT revenues have an essential role in budgetary policymaking, and vast sums of VAT are not being collected each year due to issues such as ineffective administration and tax…
The overall objective of this project is to examine how clean the tax return data is in the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA). The team will examine the following research questions: What data gaps exist in URA tax return records? What are the sources of errors (if any) in the return filing process? What challenges do…
In 2019 the Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) commissioned a National Taxpayer Survey and related study on tax compliance to the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD). This study is meant to serve as background to the new RRA Tax Compliance Strategy, which is scheduled to be launched in July 2020. Data was collected in…
The proposed research will answer three research questions: (1) Do regions that have historically received more tax revenue have better tax morale? (2) What type of tax allocation in the form of public service provision increases tax morale? (3) Can oil producing regions turn the use of revenue from the 13% fund into higher tax…
Domestic revenue mobilization is a priority for many SSA countries. Yet, low tax compliance constitutes a major challenge to this drive. Improving tax compliance will require an understanding of the underlying factors influencing a taxpayer’s decision to either pay taxes or not. However, little is known about tax compliance behaviour in most SSA countries; insights…
There is now an extensive body of literature looking into the factors that influence tax compliance. These studies, loosely known as tax morale studies, employ various tools to understand why some people pay taxes while others do not. In some cases, the studies are gender disaggregated, thereby enabling us to understand how men and women…
Project Outputs
African Tax Administration Paper
Improving the state’s ability to tax effectively is central to the development process. However, tax collections (as a percentage of GDP) are low in most developing countries — in India the ratio is about 15% — and non-compliance is widely seen as an important problem. A common strategy to evade taxes is to establish shell…
This study will examine tax compliance differential between female-owned and male-owned business enterprises in Ethiopia, particularly located in Addis Ababa. Collecting survey data on 400 medium and large size firms, we will estimate the log-odds-ratios from a fixed effect logit model to describe the probability of being tax compliant and apply a generalized Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition…
Project Outputs
Working Paper
The past decade has witnessed a surge in international interest in the importance of ‘tax morale’ as a key component of strategies for strengthening tax compliance in developing countries. This focus has been long overdue, and there is now broad research evidence that strengthening tax morale can have important benefits in encouraging ‘quasi-voluntary’ tax compliance….
Citizens’ tax morale can enhance actual compliance behavior and provide governments with the necessary revenue. This study aims to identify the various factors that shape citizens’ attitudes towards taxation and suggest ways to improve compliance through positive motivations. The 2013 5th round Afrobarometer survey conducted in Ethiopia is our main source of data. A sub…