7 October 2021
The Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law (ACTL) of the UvA has recently entered into a partnership with the Tax Administration of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (AGIP) to research about the design of more fair, efficient and fraud-proof tax systems. The research to be conducted falls under the umbrella of the UvA’s project “Designing the tax system for a Cashless, Platform-based and Technology-driven society” (CPT project).
Whenever major economic or social changes occur, tax systems must follow suit. Working from the assumption that society is in the process of transitioning to a new economic model, accelerated by the corona crisis, the CPT project examines how tax systems can be designed and structured for a society based primarily on cashless payment methods, online platforms and digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. The ultimate goal is to arrive at concrete recommendations that not only help different stakeholders – such as governments and commercial organisations – address problems under current tax systems and/or introduce structural tax reforms, but also provide guidelines and/or minimum standards for the redesign of modern tax systems.
AGIP and UvA’s objective is to combine their strengths and expertise to come up with the building blocks – based on scientific research – for making tax systems fairer, more efficient and difficult to circumvent.
An important feature of this research collaboration is that it pays special attention to the perspectives and interests of low and middle income countries, as well as to the particular tax administration challenges faced by jurisdictions with a high population density.
Professor dr. Dennis Weber, director of the CPT project, comments: “The partnership with AGIP is very important because when trying to design the tax systems of the future, a lot can be learnt from the experiences and practical problems faced by cities like Buenos Aires, with a total permanent population of 3.1 million people and 3 million more entering it on business days. Trying to solve these problems together with AGIP will be an exciting challenge for us as academics. This partnership and the overall research that we conduct under the CPT project, puts the University of Amsterdam at the heart of society”.
As an independent and inclusive initiative, the CPT project is open to governments, NGOs and companies that want to contribute to it. In addition to the support of AGIP and other partners like EY, Microsoft and Netflix, more tax authorities and commercial organisations are expected to join the CPT project in the coming months.
The initiative is also supported by the Dutch Association of Tax Advisers (NOB), the Dutch branch of the International Fiscal Association (IFA) and two Italian law firms: Maisto e Associati and Gatti Pavesi Bianchi Ludovici. Part of the project is financed through the National Sector Plan Law 2019-2025, within Digital Legal Studies. The project is also part of the Digital Transformation of Decision-Making initiative of the Amsterdam Law School.
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