During their presence at the 9th Meeting of the OECD Forum on Tax Administration, in Dublin, Ireland, representatives from CIAT, IMF, IOTA and OECD signed a “Letter of Intent to Establish a Common Platform for the Collection of Data Concerning Tax Administration.”

The Organisations have recognized that the development of a common platform for data collection offers many benefits to them and to their members. The Organisations have entered into discussions to establish the feasibility of a common platform and concluded that further work to adequately accommodate all four Organisations’ needs via a common platform offers the potential for real and tangible benefits. Specifically, it is noted that:

• The R/A-FIT tool developed by the IMF is capable of capturing the data set on which the FTA Series is based on-line and has valuable logic and error-prevention capabilities;
• There is significant overlap between the data needs of the Organisations and it will be feasible to develop a common set of questions to cover the majority of their data needs; and,
• Adopting R/A-FIT as a common data collection tool would reduce duplication of effort by the Organisations and significantly lower the cost of data provision for individual tax administration members.

The Organisations have agreed to a set of principles on which co-operation in the collection of data concerning tax administration would be based.

The letter is signed to record the intent of the Organisations to complete the remaining steps needed to realise the goal of participating fully in a functional system to provide members more current and useful information.

Signatories for the organisations were: CIAT – Socorro Velazquez; IMF – Juan Toro; IOTA – Miklos Kok; and, OECD – Pascal Saint-Amans.

The signatories, from left to right: Miklos Kok (IOTA); Pascal Saint-Amans (OECD); Juan Toro (IMF) and Socorro Velázquez (CIAT).