Resources
DDCI and its partners in the global movement have produced a range of resources on tax to help you get to grips with the tax justice debate.
Down to Earth Guide on Tax, Debt and Development Coalition Ireland 2011
A magazine style resource with country focused storyies on tax from around the world. This resouce contains a rich overview of the tax justice debate to get you thinking.The resources contain stories from Sierra Leone, Bolivia and Rwanda.
Very suitable for development education audiences.
Download the resource here
Driving the Getaway Car? Ireland Tax and Development, Dr Sheila Killian
Afri, Christian Aid, Comhlámh, Debt and Development Coalition Ireland, Oxfam Ireland, Trócaire
Taxation is about far more than revenue-raising: it concerns power and impacts taxpayer behaviour. It is pivotal in enhancing accountability and participation in young states through the bargaining process between a government and its citizens. Very significantly, it often has unexpected consequences, and the tax system of one country can easily have an impact on economic or social behaviour in another. Since business is now international, it is important that taxes are designed not only with a domestic agenda in mind, but with a view to their consequences internationally, particularly for vulnerable economies in the global South.
The ability to collect tax is particularly important for Southern countries, for which it represents a far more sustainable solution to poverty than international aid. But Southern countries face particular challenges in this area. On a domestic level, there is the problem of how to tax a vast informal economy with little financial infrastructure. Southern taxing authorities struggle to collect revenue in the face of post-colonial attitudes resulting in poor tax compliance, relative tax complexity and poor taxpayer education, major gaps in their capacity, shifting tax structures often driven by IMF or World Bank lending, trade liberalisation, corruption and a deficient rule of law.
On an international level, tax challenges for Southern countries include capital flight, a lack of relative power in negotiations around foreign direct investment (FDI), tax competition, transfer pricing abuse by multinational firms, secrecy in some tax haven jurisdictions, and isolation through a thin network of tax treaties. Mozambique was chosen for particular examination in Section 5 of this report because it is an Irish Aid priority country. The country has been through IMF-led tax reform, and illustrates many of the classic problems encountered by the taxing authorities of Southern countries. Suggested solutions to some of Mozambique's difficulties may be taken from the experience of other African countries.
Ireland may pose an inadvertent threat to the tax capacity of Southern countries if its tax system is used by multinational firms as part of capital flight, or international tax evasion schemes.Ireland has attracted considerable foreign direct investment (FDI) through tax competition using a low rate of corporation tax, a wide network of double tax treaties and incentives for intellectual property to encourage multinational firms to locate in the country. Although Ireland has recently introduced new rules to counter transfer pricing abuse, these have significant weaknesses. There is a clear risk that without closing these gaps, our tax system can become a vehicle for complex tax avoidance schemes used by multinational firms to reduce their global tax liability. This is neither in the interests of countries which lose revenue to these firms, or in the interest of Ireland as a legitimate destination for FDI.
Download the report here
Kenya Report, Taxation and State Building in Kenya: Enhancing Revenue Capacity to Advance Human Welfare, Tax Justice Nertwork
Tax is widely considered a complex subject that should be left to experts. This perception has contributed to the huge gap in information available to the public on the issues of tax and development. This report seeks to narrow this gap by providing a broad overview of key policy issues in Kenya from a tax justice perspective. The report targets Kenyan readers and anyone else who wants to understand policy issues in tax and development in Africa.
This reports starts from a human rights perspective on tax and wealth distribution. Human rights are understood in this report to encompass not just socio-political but also economic human rights. The report argues that economic human rights include the right to food, education, health security and other basic rights: achieving these rights is conditional on the availability of financial resources to fund them. Tax is therefore key to ensuring that the Kenyan state can fulfil its human rights obligations.
With the debate on tax and development gaining a global audience, this report provides an international context through which this debate can be applied in Kenya. The authors contend that the role of tax as a tool for development has been largely ignored in development policy-making for decades. This is now chang-ing rapidly, as international organisation including the United Nations, the IMF, the OECD and international civil society organisations led by the global Tax Justice Network work towards bringing the tax debate to the international development arena.
Download the report here