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Dear Readers,

It is my great pleasure to introduce the 32nd edition of Tax
Tribune, the magazine of the Intra-European Organisation of
Tax Administrations (IOTA). This edition marks a change of
format for this IOTA publication as it is the first time that we
publish the Tax Tribune in the format of an e-book. Our aim is
to make the magazine and its articles easier to reach.

I am convinced that all five articles will present useful information and experience
what kind of actions tax administrations can take in order to increase and/or
maintain the confidence of citizens in tax administrations. The article of Lennart
Wittberg and Anders Stridh describes how behavioural economics (people’s actual
behaviour based on empirical evidence) can contribute to the development of
compliance strategies. The compliance strategy of the Swedish Tax Agency is aimed
at increasing the willingness to comply by building trust and to make it easy to
comply and difficult not to comply. Pia Mettala and Hannu Hautamäki demonstrate
the efforts of the Finnish Tax Administration to maintain confidence in the overall
tax system by presenting the example of the Real Time Audit (RTA) Project in
Finland. The RTA kind of audit is one possibility to gather information of customer
behaviour and encourage tax compliance. Simon Vincent and Steve Morgan explain
how the UK’s Tax Authority has applied the Court of Justice of the European Union
(CJEU) judgment within the framework of a Multilateral Control (MLC) event. The
rapid progress of this MLC has been achieved through positive engagement and
extensive co-operation with other Member States’ tax authorities. The outcome
demonstrates that the UK is making use of all legal acts to disrupt fraudulent
activities. Rivo Reitmann highlights the possible positive effects of the establishment
of an integrated Employment Register in Estonia: increased tax revenue collection to
the state budget is expected – estimated additional tax yield per year is about 10
million euro. The Estonian Tax and Customs Board started the project in common
with other interested public agencies with the aim of reducing the administrative
burden on employers since employment data is no longer duplicated to different
public agencies as it is now converged and integrated into one system. Laurence
Geyduschek presents the initiatives taken by Belgium in the promotion and
facilitation of electronic invoices which it has greatly contributed to a shift of mind
of enterprises who have now started to enhance their existing e-invoicing

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