The document Tax Administration 2013 has been issued by the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration. This report includes statistics on tax administration from 52 tax administrations covering advanced and emerging economies. The document is designed to identify areas for improvement of tax administration and to facilitate dialogue between tax administrators from different countries.

Increasingly tax authorities are being established with greater autonomy and there is a trend towards greater integration of customs and direct tax authorities. There is also increasing integration of the collection of tax and social security contributions. Some countries have been introducing structures within their tax administration with fewer layers of hierarchy and with greater centralization. Tax departments are being organized with sections devoted to the affairs of particular groups of taxpayers, such as for example the introduction of larger taxpayer sections. Also, some countries are downsizing the office networks within the tax administration.

There is also a trend towards a focus on outcomes such as greater compliance, taxpayer service and a reduction in the burden of compliance. This is the focus of planning and monitoring by tax administrations, with their success in achieving their aims often being reported as part of their departmental annual report. The monitoring and measurement of performance on these outcomes may then lead to evaluation and refinement of their approach.

Statistics collected by the OECD including performance related aggregates and ratios indicate that tax administrations are increasingly making refunds of tax to their taxpayers. This trend may have been partly caused by the general downturn in taxpayer incomes following the financial crisis from 2008 onwards. This suggests that tax administration time may be taken up in making refunds that would not be necessary if tax collection could be made more efficient. This situation also gives rise to possibilities for tax fraud as taxpayers may make false claims for refunds by providing false documentation or other false information.

The statistics suggest that there is scope for tax administrations to change their way of tax collection to ensure less costly collection mechanisms, for example by moving from paper returns and the issue of assessments by the administration to electronic returns and self assessment by taxpayers. Some tax administrations do not appear to have sufficient control over assessing the costs of some of the more expensive aspects of taxpayer service such as enquiries by taxpayers in person or by telephone. Many administrations are not efficient enough in their measurement and monitoring of the various tasks they perform so as to achieve greater cost effectiveness.

Progress is being made in all tax administrations on introducing electronic delivery of tax returns and more than half the tax administrations surveyed were providing the possibility of online returns for their taxpayers for each of the major taxes. Progress is also being made in the process of automating the payment of tax. However in the case of about 40% of the tax administrations in the survey this automation was not well advanced and resources were being taken up by the provision of on-site tax payment services for their taxpayers.

There is not much legislation in the surveyed tax administrations with regard to the responsibilities of tax intermediaries in the process of tax compliance. There is still plenty of scope for the reduction of compliance costs by greater engagement by tax authorities with tax intermediaries or the provision of services that can assist these intermediaries to interact with the system of compliance. This greater engagement would improve the tax compliance burden for taxpayers generally.

The overall picture of taxpayer rights and of the filing and collection methods across the surveyed countries suggests that many of the countries still have scope for changes in their tax reporting or payment systems that would reduce the compliance burden on taxpayers and would improve the efficiency of tax collection. The report also considers that more countries would benefit from the use of policies to encourage the voluntary disclosure of tax that has not been reported in the past.