Using ISORA to develop a single set of global tax administration indicators

Ágnes Kővágó's picture
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The Technical Working Group (TWG) for the International Survey on Revenue Administration (ISORA) met for its annual meeting in Paris on 16-18 October, hosted by the OECD. The annual meeting was followed by a one-day brainstorming workshop with the Addis Tax Initiative (ATI), where the ISORA TWG and the representatives for ATI discussed possible common tax administration indicators.

The TWG meeting was attended by the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), IOTA and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). IOTA was represented by Vegard Holmedahl, International Tax Expert.

ISORA collects tax administration data from member tax administrations in the four organisations. The first round of ISORA was launched in May 2016. It was made available in English, French and Spanish. 135 administrations participated, and the data was submitted via the RA-FIT data collection platform hosted by IMF. ISORA is now in its second round, launched May 2018, and we expect more than 150 tax administrations to participate.

At the TWG meeting, the following topics were discussed:

ISORA 2018 – Data collection process

ISORA 2018 – Data review process

ISORA 2018 – Issues, concepts and definitions

ISORA 2018 – Data dissemination

Data dissemination portals

ISORA 2020 – plans for next survey

Revision of the Memorandum Of Understanding between the organisations

Model agreement for engaging with other organisations

ISORA 2018 – Set of tax administration indicators

Photo: participants of the TWG from left to right: Julio Lopez, CIAT, Gaspar Maldonado, CIAT, Santiago Diaz, CIAT, Vegard Holmedahl, IOTA, Oliver Petzold, OECD, William Crandall, IMF, Elizabeth Gavin, IMF, Andrew Masters, IMF.

The annual meeting was followed by a one-day brainstorming workshop with the Addis Tax Initiative (ATI), where the ISORA TWG and the representatives for ATI discussed possible common tax administration indicators.

The background for the workshop was that members of the ATI have been discussing the development of tax administration indicators to monitor Commitment 2 of the ATI (developing countries’ commitment to improve their tax systems) and improving the indicators included in the ATI’s monitoring report published in 2017. Since the ISORA partners and the ATI are both working on tax administration indicators, and to avoid seeing multiple standardised indicator sets being developed, the TWG invited the ATI to this workshop. The goal was to discuss and, if possible, agree on a single set of tax administration indicators that can be used globally.

The participants had very fruitful discussions that will be helpful for finding common grounds on this subject.