Asking, one gets to Rome

I had the opportunity to work very closely on the book “State of Tax Administrations in Latin America 2006-2010”, a joint effort by the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Regional Assistance Center for Central America and the Dominican Republic (CAPTAC-DR), which presents a reliable study on the Tax Administrations conditions.

This book was the result of the information collected through a questionnaire which was sent to 17 countries of Latin America.

Without providing opinions regarding the answers, since these have been analyzed by specialists of the field, I wish to comment the questionnaire.

The questionnaire (final version) is composed of 10 chapters, with 320 questions, and 5 of these questions are subdivided (1 question subdivided into 2; 3 questions which are each subdivided into 3 and 1 question is subdivided into 8). This means there were actually 334 questions, in addition to the organization charts, and other legal tax annexes.

These 334 questions were organized according to the following categories:

There were 150 true/false questions, of which many were conditioned to the previous answer; 71 were optional questions (in most of them, there was an also option “other; explain”.  45 were questions requiring answers with statistical data and the other (68) required writing a developed answer.

Of the 150 true/false questions, we found comments next to 117 of them, which indicate that all is not neatly black or white and the grays are dominant. Apparently institutions find difficult to answer “yes or no” and prefer to provide their respective explanations.

The longest chapter is the fourth, which is about “Tax procedures”, with 108 questions; the shortest is the tenth chapter, “Trends and Future Challenges”, with only 4 questions (all with answers in text). Curiously, not for being the shortest chapter, this is the one all answered.  Proportionally the chapter that countries have answered most was the third one, “Legal framework”, which includes 45 questions; this is the second longest one in the number of questions.

Questions which required statistical data were the least answered, we hope this will improve in the next questionnaires since these data are the most useful tool for comparative studies

Finally, six of the ten chapters included a final space for additional comments, which was used by ten institutions regarding the third chapter, as to let us believe that this is an area where saying a lot is needed for comparisons.

We hope that in a second survey, in which other CIAT members will participate, we will benefit from additional and improved information.

Welcome to discover the reality of TAs in Latin America. The following link allow access to the English version

http://biblioteca.ciat.org/opac/

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