-
Recent reports commissioned by the Forum on Tax Administration (FTA) have recommended that revenue bodies strengthen their outcome measures. Revenue bodies face many difficulties in developing and implementing outcome measures. However considerable progress has been made towards the goal of using better outcome measures in practice.
-
-
Revenue bodies want to measure tax compliance outcomes because outcomes are what they ultimately care about: that taxpayers are paying the right tax, that the right revenues are coming in and that the tax administration system has integrity so people have confidence in it. Everything that the revenue bodies do is about achieving these and other outcomes.
-
-
-
This chapter outlines three pragmatic approaches for measuring and attributing tax compliance outcomes through revenue metrics. These revenue outcomes relate to collecting the right tax at the right time. The focus is less on taxpayers’ behaviour and more on getting the right tax result. This is often expressed as maximising tax revenues or closing the tax gap. These approaches are not exhaustive but draw attention to some of the best current and emerging practice for revenue bodies to consider, drawn from a survey of the OECD Forum on Tax Administration membership.
-
This chapter outline three pragmatic approaches for measuring and attributing voluntary compliance outcomes. These voluntary compliance outcomes relate to taxpayers’ behaviour in complying voluntarily with tax obligations: registration, filing, reporting, payment and any additional obligations. In essence, it is about taxpayers being “in control” of their tax obligations, which covers both what tax results and how the taxpayer got to that result. These approaches are not exhaustive but draw attention to some of the best current and emerging practice for revenue bodies to consider drawn from a survey of the OECD Forum on Tax Administration membership.
-
This chapter explores approaches for measuring integrity outcomes. These integrity outcomes cover that the revenue body administers the tax system fairly and that the community has confidence in the revenue body’s administration of the tax system. Therefore this chapter explores two types of measures of tax compliance integrity: the internal quality and governance measures to demonstrate that the revenue body acts with integrity and its actions are procedurally fair, and the external measures to reflect how these actions build community trust and confidence.
-
This chapter explores the costs and benefits of the various measurement approaches, and covers some of the considerations when choosing or designing outcome measures. It emphasis that rather than there being one right set of performance measures, revenue bodies need to consider they need to include in a fit for purpose basket of measures and what approaches would have most added-value to enhance their current performance measurement framework.
-
This chapter provides practical advice for revenue bodies seeking to develop and implement outcome measures. It reiterates the importance of the principle of integrating performance measures into the revenue body’s processes. It also emphasises the importance of communicating why changes are happening.
-
This report has surveyed current and emerging practice, and from real world experience developed guiding principles for international best practice in measuring tax compliance outcomes. Revenue bodies have wanted to measure outcomes for some time and yet few are completely satisfied with their current measures. In particular, revenue bodies reported three main limitations with current measures around decision making, executing the strategy and explaining performance to stakeholders. Given these challenges still exist after sustained efforts to strengthen outcome measures, should revenue bodies continue to invest in developing outcome measures or is it just too difficult?