Digital IDs and Digital Payments – Opportunities and Challenges for Tax Administration
Date
2024-04Author
Santoro, Fabrizio
Prichard, Wilson
Mascagni, Giulia
Metadata
Show full item recordImpact
Abstract
Tax administrations in Africa and, more broadly, low-income countries (LICs), are
increasingly investing in advanced digital technologies, in an effort to build more
effective, rules-based and efficient tax systems. Those efforts fit within broader
government efforts towards e-government and the establishment of digital public
infrastructures (DPI).
1
While these efforts to digitalise tax administration are multi faceted, affecting all aspects of administration, recent years have seen growing
attention to the potential impacts of digital ID systems (DIS) and digital merchant
payments (DMP), both of which are linked closely to broader discussions of the
potential of DPI to strengthen development outcomes. This growing attention has been
driven by hopes that building such systems can contribute to significant improvements
in tax systems and revenue collection as part of broader and ambitious digitalisation
efforts undertaken by African governments (World Bank 2016; IMF 2020).