Challenges of Indian Tax Administration

Abstract

Every tax administration throughout the world collects taxes from its taxpayers in order to garner resources for the government’s public expenditure. Naturally, this process becomes easier for the tax administration if the taxpayers willingly and voluntarily comply with their obligations under the country’s tax code. In enhancing taxpayers’ level of voluntary compliance, three factors play a very important role – certainty about the tax to be paid (it relates to the ability to determine without any ambiguity, the tax payable on any transaction since ambiguity adds to the cost of compliance), the convenience to pay it (the means and methods using which the taxpayer can pay his share of tax to the government with minimum compliance cost), and the attitude of the tax administration which drives both of these (helpful, unobtrusive and non-adversarial). It is therefore an important responsibility of every country’s revenue body to provide relevant and easily understandable information to the taxpayers which would help facilitate paying of taxes, filing of returns and other activities by the taxpayers. As a corollary to this, improving information service delivery also becomes critical to boost the said voluntary compliance. In the realm of information service delivery, revenue bodies have realised that each category or group of taxpayers act or respond differently to their immediate tax environment as well as to the information that is provided by the revenue bodies. There is a need to carry out ‘taxpayer segmentation’ so that the diverse categories of taxpayers can be catered to accordingly.