Tax Administration and Compliance

Non-filing refers to taxpayers who fail to submit a tax declaration, thus becoming ghosts in the eyes of tax authorities. It is a widespread phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa, and has a number of detrimental fiscal effects. Non-filing has been largely unexplored in the literature, which focusses more on active filers. The overall aim of this…

An important part of every country’s development process is the building of a social contract in which citizens pay tax and, in turn, receive public goods and services. Evidence suggests that this is associated with the establishment of a norm of tax payment and a belief that non-payment is wrong. We exploit a new, nationally…

Increasing emphasis is being placed on the need for low income countries to collect more tax revenue. In parallel, the need for equitable tax systems is also gaining prominence. While African countries have made remarkable progress in increasing tax collections, taxation in many African countries is inequitable in various respects. For example, many revenue authorities…

The rate of occurrence of tax evasion is higher in Uganda than in the rest of East Africa. Where the taxpayer has latitude to decide whether or not to be compliant, as in the case of income taxes, Ugandans seem to be less compliant than other East Africans. Uganda collects less in domestic taxes than…

Low-income countries are increasing their fiscal independence through the improvement of domestic taxation systems. To continue to do so, they must ensure that these systems are perceived as equitable and preserve their integrity. An essential characteristic of an equitable tax system is the treatment of wealthy individuals. In this paper, we use key informant interviews…

Poor compliance is one of the key factors behind persistently low tax-to-GDP ratios in developing countries. Two dimensions of non-compliance that have been widely studied are under-reporting and non-filing (i.e. failing to submit a tax declaration altogether). However, there is a third and largely under-researched dimension of non-compliance: nil-filing. It refers to taxpayers who are…

When judged by the standard criteria for effective tax administration, as carried out under the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool (TADAT), the Malawi Revenue Authority (MRA) appears to perform very poorly, even by the standards of low-income countries. These observations are in conflict with the facts that the MRA (a) is rather effective at capturing…

Nil-filing refers to taxpayers who report zero on all fields of their tax declaration. It is a largely ignored phenomenon in the tax literature, despite being well known to tax administrators. There is almost no evidence on the characteristics of nil-filers and the reasons for their apparently puzzling behaviour. This paper sheds light on this…

We currently know very little about the taxation of professionals in Africa – scholarly work on this group of taxpayers is scant. The little research that does exist is located within the literature on the taxation of the ‘hard-to-tax’, a term in tax evasion literature that refers to farmers, small and medium-sized enterprises, and professionals….

This study explores how small business owners talk about their tax responsibility, especially in non-enabling institutional contexts. It identifies two main types of tax responsibility discourses amongst these business owners: (1) duty-based and (2) rights-based. The duty-based talks see taxation primarily as the citizens’ responsibility to governments, which should always be fulfilled unconditionally, while rights-based…