CHAPTER 8
Conclusion
A Framework for Tax Reform Innovative approaches are needed to overcome the persistent technical, political, and social barriers to improving tax compliance. Traditionally, tax reformers have aimed to strengthen compliance through investments in enforcement and facilitation of tax payments, drawing heavily on technical best practices from across countries. This approach has achieved important successes across countries in recent decades, yielding sustained progress in strengthening revenue collection, rationalizing tax policies, and improving tax administration. Yet those reform efforts have also fallen short of their ambitions in a variety of ways. This reform pattern is something of a puzzle. Reform efforts may seem highly promising—and there have been many successes—yet across time and space the overall progress has been uneven. Revenue improvements have been steady but also relatively slow. Collection of more progressive taxes on income and property remains weak. Both multinational companies and wealthy individuals continue to benefit from the weaknesses in the international tax system. The adoption and deployment of new technologies have been uneven. And the heavy, often informal burdens of revenue collection on smaller taxpayers remain common. Even seemingly simple measures to improve performance have frequently proven difficult to enact. Governments have seemed reluctant to adopt the types of policy experiments and simplification reforms that are consistent with recent research and appear to hold substantial promise. Meanwhile, tax agencies
Conclusion
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