Paying Taxes 2015 report has indicated that the compliance sub-indicators continue to fall, noting that labour taxes and consumption taxes drive the reduction in time.
Paying Taxes 2015 is a unique study from PwC, the World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC), comparing tax regimes in 189 economies around the world.
According to the report, reforms continue to be made in Africa, while progress is less evident in South America. South America now has the highest average time to comply and Total Tax Rate.
Central Asia and Eastern Europe are still the fastest reforming regions with a major focus on improving administrative systems. All three sub-indicators have fallen with the number of payments and time to comply, both now below the world average.
“On average, it takes our case study company 264 hours to comply with its taxes, it makes 25.9 payments and has an average Total Tax Rate of 40.9 percent. All three sub-indicators have continued to fall following a trend seen during the nine years of the study,” the report states.
“The average Total Tax Rate fell by 1.3 percentage points. Excluding the replacement of cascading sales taxes in Africa with VAT, the Total Tax Rate still falls by 0.2 percentage points. This is made up of an increase in profit taxes of 0.1 percentage points and a fall in ‘other’ taxes of 0.3 percentage points,” the survey states.
Labour taxes and mandatory contributions, and profit taxes continue to be equally important in the profile of taxes borne for the survey’s case study company.
“Forty-three percent of economies now have electronic filing and payment systems which are used by the majority of companies. The pace of reform accelerated during the financial crisis, slowed in more recent years, but improvement continues. 379 reforms making it easier and less costly to pay taxes have been recorded since 2004, 105 of these relate to electronic filing and payment,” the report states further.
Paying Taxes records the taxes and mandatory contributions that a medium-size company must pay in a given year as well as measuring the administrative burden of paying taxes and contributions.
Taxes and contributions measured include corporate income and other profit taxes, social contributions and labour taxes paid by the employer, property taxes, property transfer taxes, dividend tax, capital gains tax, financial transactions tax, waste collection taxes, vehicle and road taxes, and any other small taxes or fees.
Iheanyi Nwachukwu
