Value Added Tax Evasion, Auditing and Transactions Matching

This paper extends the standard theoretical model of tax enforcement by allowing for the cross- matching of transactions in addition to the auditing of taxpayers. For the Value Added Tax (VAT) the matching of purchase and sales invoices is an important enforcement technique. The paper examines the impact such enforcement on the revenue effectiveness and efficiency consequences of the VAT. Transactions matching is shown to have very different effects from auditing: Even when auditing alone is unable to induce non-zero taxpayer reports, and regardless of the expected success rate in auditing of the tax administration, sufficiently intensive cross- matching can induce truthful reporting. On the other hand, matching leads to distorted purchase and sales transactions. It can also distort input use and output decisions even if auditing alone has no adverse effects. In the model, conditions under which the VAT leaves input prices undistorted are found and the content of the often made claim, that a VAT is self-enforcing, is explored. The ability of the tax administration to enforce compliance with the VAT is shown to be sensitive to the knowledge that the tax administration has about the production technology

Decomposing Revenue Effects of Tax Evasion, Base Broadening and Tax Rate Reduction

This paper proposes a method for evaluating the impact of tax reform on tax revenues and the distribution of the tax burden. The technique consists of decomposing actual revenue relative to potential revenue into components attributable to (i) changes in the tax rate structure (ii) deductions and (iii) tax evasion. If the standard reform package is successful, revenue loss from deductions should be curtailed by base broadening. Furthermore, revenues lost by lowering tax rates should be more than compensated by the induced decline in tax evasion. We use the method to examine tax reforms in India. Our results indicate that, for the reform episode we examine, reform did have the looked for effect but that these gains could not be sustained over time. The magnitude of the gains from the reform were limited and failed to curtail losses from tax evasion to any significant extent. At a disaggregated level, gains to the exchequer from the tax reform have arisen mainly from low income taxpayers without having much impact on upper income group taxpayers. Furthermore, the reforms had little or no impact on deductions taken by business income earners and professionals. This raises questions about the desirability of base-broadening and rate-cum-slab reduction from the perspective of equity

A Comparison of Sales Taxes

We describe the simple analytics of the four main types of sales taxes under revenue neutrality: the retail sales tax, the value added tax, a cascading sales tax and a manufacturers' sales tax. The retail sales tax is shown to be equivalent to a value added tax. In order to produce equal revenues these two taxes must be at a higher rate than a cascading tax. However, output under a retail sales tax exceeds that under a cascading sales tax and deadweight losses are lower. The manufacturers' sales tax offers the worst of all worlds: with revenue neutrality the manufacturers' sales tax has a higher tax rate, lower output and greater deadweight loss than all the other taxes

Privacy-Aware Recommender Systems Challenge on Twitter's Home Timeline

Recommender systems constitute the core engine of most social network platforms nowadays, aiming to maximize user satisfaction along with other key business objectives. Twitter is no exception. Despite the fact that Twitter data has been extensively used to understand socioeconomic and political phenomena and user behaviour, the implicit feedback provided by users on Tweets through their engagements on the Home Timeline has only been explored to a limited extent. At the same time, there is a lack of large-scale public social network datasets that would enable the scientific community to both benchmark and build more powerful and comprehensive models that tailor content to user interests. By releasing an original dataset of 160 million Tweets along with engagement information, Twitter aims to address exactly that. During this release, special attention is drawn on maintaining compliance with existing privacy laws. Apart from user privacy, this paper touches on the key challenges faced by researchers and professionals striving to predict user engagements. It further describes the key aspects of the RecSys 2020 Challenge that was organized by ACM RecSys in partnership with Twitter using this dataset.Comment: 16 pages, 2 table

Is the Doctor Required to Obtain Consent of the Patient in Case of Accident?

Medicolegal&nbsp

An MBBS Doctor Admits a Patient Under Him and a Specialist Visits the Patient 1 or 2 Times. But, the Patient does not Change the File Name or Transfers the Case. Is This Correct or Incorrect?

Medicolega