Meeting the Challenges of Fostering Domestic Revenue through Knowledge-Sharing
As Head of International Tax Cooperation Division at the Revenue Service of Georgia, Mr. Davit Chitaishvili manages a team in charge of different aspects of tax cooperation-related initiatives worldwide. His team is particularly interested in introducing modern exchange of information mechanisms at the Revenue Service to effectively tackle tax evasion and avoidance, and to mobilize domestic revenue resources through different mechanisms of cooperation. This motivated Mr. Chitaishvili to join our recent online course that encouraged discussions on how to improve cooperation between government bodies to ensure the entire country’s commitment for mobilizing domestic revenues. We are happy to share Mr. Chitaishvili’s reflections on the usefulness and proceedings of this course.
“I had an opportunity to participate in very interesting discussions with about 30 participants from the Central European region. For me, coming from a “technical” organization (tax administration of Georgia), it was exciting to hear and discuss issues related to public finances: how this system works and operates in normal times, and how the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has affected it. We dug further into the details of tax policy matters and possibilities for increasing domestic resources, with experienced trainers and colleagues from different countries providing unique perspectives on the matters. These were the main things that caught my attention, as the other aspects of the training were familiar to me, being part of my day-to-day work.
I also appreciated a general and high-level overview of public finances, which helped me broaden my understanding of policy matters and enabled me to see the macro picture of public finances behind all these technical activities that we perform on a daily basis. I believe that the more opportunities I have to learn about tax policy matters, the better my work results will be. So, the biggest values of the training course were inspiration, better understanding and greater motivation to work on further improvements in our field of work and contribute to the success of my administration and country.
Participating in this course also helped me gain more clarity about the issues related to fostering domestic revenue mobilization. I could put more pieces of the puzzle together, and thus made my view clearer than it was before; it enlightened me, since education is the light that shines in the dark. Every other day we learn and become better than we were before.
On a personal level, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to meet many educated, enlightened and great professionals at this course. This proved again that we do great things for building and shaping our future; that we are important, and that we are the bridges of our administrations and countries. And like every bridge in the world is different and uniquely beautiful, so are human bridges – we have common goals while we are all unique and beautiful.
Has my participation contributed to the success of the organization I work for? Yes, it has. An organization refers to a group of people working towards achieving the same goals, and little gets done when people do not have a common knowledge and understanding of the things that they are trying to achieve. So, thanks to this training course, my organization is now doing better, as five of us got a better overview and understanding of the topics discussed.”