The applicability of the OTS Complexity Index to comparative analysis between countries: Australia, New Zealand, Turkey and he UK
Budak, T; James, SR
Date: 1 November 2016
Article
Journal
eJournal of Tax Research
Publisher
Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales
Related links
Abstract
Tax systems world-wide are becoming more complex for a variety of reasons. Countries such as Australia, New Zealand
(NZ) and the UK have attempted to simplify their taxes but with limited success. The Complexity Index produced by the
Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) in the UK is an important contribution in this field. This paper ...
Tax systems world-wide are becoming more complex for a variety of reasons. Countries such as Australia, New Zealand
(NZ) and the UK have attempted to simplify their taxes but with limited success. The Complexity Index produced by the
Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) in the UK is an important contribution in this field. This paper considers general issues
in relation to complexity and simplification and then examines the usefulness of the OTS Complexity Index for making
international comparisons by applying it to income tax and VAT or GST in Australia, NZ, Turkey and the UK. It finds some
striking differences in the complexity of the taxes in these countries. For example, Turkey’s score is much better in terms of
total underlying complexity, whereas NZ’s score is better in terms of total impact complexity for taxes. This paper provides
evidence that identifies certain areas where the level of complexity might be unnecessarily high. It also finds that the OTS
Complexity Index is not appropriate for international comparative analysis although it can be utilised to gather common data
in different countries. This paper suggests that by creating an international index based on the OTS method would make a
major contribution to the development of a new approach in tax simplification.
Management
Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy
Item views 0
Full item downloads 0