Revenue Administration

This report is the ninth edition of the OECD's Tax Administration Series. It provides internationally comparative data on aspects of tax systems and their administration in 59 advanced and emerging economies.

This paper presents the results of the second round of the Revenue Administration Fiscal Information Tool (RA-FIT) country survey in an aggregated manner for all respondents and by income group. Notwithstanding regional biases and some data quality issues with the sample, broad insights and trends are discernible from the data, and the results form part of an evolving series that will continue to develop and grow with the International Survey On Revenue Administration (ISORA), the successor survey to RA-FIT conducted by the IMF in collaboration with the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT), the Intra-European Organisation of Tax Administration (IOTA), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This paper expands on a previous one, which covered the first round of RA-FIT (Lemgruber and others 2015),1 and aims to allow countries to access information about key measures in revenue administration. Unlike the first paper, this one does not cover issues specific to customs administration but focuses rather on tax administration data.

During the past few years, the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) has developed the Revenue Administration Fiscal Information Tool (RA-FIT), a tax and customs data gathering initiative. This paper, the first of its kind internationally given the number of countries covered, analyzes the results of the first round of RA-FIT data for 85 countries. It begins the process of making summarized cross-country information available to revenue administrations, in particular in developing economies, to help them improve their performance. Topics covered include performance measurement, institutional arrangements, and core operations of tax and customs administration. RA-FIT is in its second round of data gathering, now via an online portal; these data will be analyzed and in future made available to participating countries and technical assistance partners/donors through an online dissemination platform.

This report looks at effective e-service provision by tax administrations, summarising eight critical areas, and explores big data management and portals, as well as natural systems. It highlights key opportunities, looking at how these emerging technologies can be best used by tax administrations.

During the past few years, the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD) has developed the Revenue Administration Fiscal Information Tool (RA-FIT), a tax and customs data gathering initiative. This paper, the first of its kind internationally given the number of countries covered, analyzes the results of the first round of RA-FIT data for 85 countries. It begins the process of making summarized cross-country information available to revenue administrations, in particular in developing economies, to help them improve their performance. Topics covered include performance measurement, institutional arrangements, and core operations of tax and customs administration. RA-FIT is in its second round of data gathering, now via an online portal; these data will be analyzed and in future made available to participating countries and technical assistance partners/donors through an online dissemination platform.

The IMF Fiscal Affairs Department’s Revenue Administration Gap Analysis Program (RA-GAP) assists revenue administrations from IMF member countries in monitoring taxpayer compliance through tax gap analysis. The RA-GAP methodology for estimating the VAT gap presented in this Technical Note has some distinct advantages over commonly used methodologies. By using a value-added approach to estimating potential VAT revenues, as compared to the more traditional final consumption approach used by most countries undertaking VAT gap estimation, the RA-GAP methodology can provide VAT compliance gap estimates on a sector-by-sector basis, which assists revenue administrations to better target compliance efforts to close the gap. In addition, the RA-GAP methodology uses a unique measurement for actual VAT revenues, which isolates changes in revenue performance that might be due to cash management (e.g., delays in refunds) from those due to actual changes in taxpayer compliance.

In order to minimize the need for taxpayers to respond to multiple revenue agencies, some countries have integrated their revenue administrations, either by merging tax and customs administration, or unifying collection of tax and social contributions. This book examines the experience of 11 countries in doing so. Their experiences indicate that integrating collection entails modernizing the revenue administration and reducing contact between the tax office and taxpayers, thanks to the extensive use of ICT.

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