【英文】普华永道+世界银行报告：2020年世界纳税报告Paying Taxes 2020（50P）

The introduction of electronic systems for filing and paying taxes has cut tax compliance  times globally. Electronic filing (e-filing) and electronic payment (e-payment) are the  processes of submitting tax returns and payments over the Internet. E-filing and e-payment  have various benefits that have made the tax preparation process easier for businesses,  including the ability to file a tax return from one’s office at a convenient time and the ability  to prepopulate tax returns with data already held by the tax administration. The United  States was the first economy to introduce e-filing, in 1986, followed by Australia in 1987.

The use of electronic tax filing and payment systems  has risen sharply since 2004,9  when only 43 of the 174  economies measured by Doing Business had an online  system for filing and paying taxes. Fifteen years later,  this number has more than doubled (to 106) as  economies have shifted from filing taxes manually and  paying them in person to filing tax returns electronically  and paying taxes online.  The economies of Europe and Central Asia10 show the  most notable progress (see Figure 7). The average  compliance time in this region fell from 473 hours per  year in 2004 to 225 hours in 2018 mainly because of  the use of e-filing and e-payment in addition to the  simplifying and streamlining of the tax systems of  the individual economies. Since Doing Business 2006, 63 economies have  introduced online platforms for filing tax returns  including online payment modules. Europe and Central  Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific, were the two most  proactive regions in introducing such systems.

The  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and  Development (OECD) high-income group has the  highest share of economies (97%) using e-filing or  e-payments, whereas sub-Saharan Africa has the lowest  (17%). Factors inhibiting the adoption of technology by  tax administrations and taxpayers include low literacy  levels, unreliable information technology (IT)  infrastructure, and poor availability of suitable  accounting and tax preparation software. Doing  Business data shows, however, that the use of online  systems for tax filing and payment resulted in efficiency  gains in several economies in sub-Saharan Africa in  2017–18, including Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mauritius  and Togo.