What was it about

Revenue authorities across South East Europe (SEE) are embarking on institutional transformation to continue the modernization of their organizations. Fundamental to the transformation of regional administrations is the adoption of the EU/OECD compliance risk management (CRM) model.

This learning initiative provided an overview of the principles and practices under which revenue authorities can deliver tax compliance risk management in a structured and systematic way. In particular, the course offered forum for discussion on what revenue authorities across SEE can do to collect the full amount of taxes due by acting within the law using modern CRM methods, and move closer to the valuable templates for contemporary tax administration contained in the EU Fiscal Blueprints.

In times of tight budgets these are complex tasks. The course showed that new approaches to risk rating and risk treatment, co-operative working with taxpayers and influencing their behaviour along with the targeted taxpayer education programs, and tightening of controls and enforcement where the risk is perceived to be high not only enable revenue authorities to allocate their compliance resources in the most efficient and effective way but such measures also allow them to achieve an optimum tax compliance strategy.

What were the benefits

Course sessions used a seminar format with a number of hands-on exercises built in to maximize learning. These further illustrated the important implications of discussed subject matters for participants’ own working practices.

By the end of the course, participants:

• Learned about the current directions in CRM and discussed strategies for the effective administration of taxes
• Examined different tools, approaches and compliance strategies to best mitigate tax non-compliance with the available resources
• Learned why traditional compliance programs based largely on audit, even when successful in conventional terms, could have surprising and counter-productive longer term effects
• Received insights into how to strengthen taxpayer services in order to incentivize compliance
• Exchanged experiences and understood how different tax administrations apply the CRM framework

Who was it for

The course was designed for mid to senior level tax officials who are involved and/or have experience with the compliance risk management within their institutions.

Faculty

This course will be delivered by Lisette van der Hel and Menno Griffioen, both from the Dutch Ministry of Finance and Steffen Hansen from International Monetary Fund.

Lisette van der Hel is strategic advisor of the Management Board of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration in the area of Compliance Risk Management (CRM). Previously, she was manager of the Compliance Risk Management Unit, with specific responsibility for policy advising, research, intelligence, monitoring and international aspects of CRM. She is a member of the steering group of the EU Risk Management Platform and chair of the working group on the Tax Gap and Compliance Map. In 2010 she led the working group on the update of the Compliance Risk Management Guide. Besides these responsibilities, she was appointed as a Professor of Effective Governmental Supervision at Nyenrode Business University in Breukelen, the Netherlands.

In the last decade Lisette took part in numerous projects for development of tax administrations. She has a lot of experience in giving training sessions, workshops and doing strategic analysis in developing countries.

Partners

This learning initiative was supported by: