Tax Enforcement for SMEs: Lessons from the Italian Experience?

Giampaolo Arachi and Alessandro Santoro
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Giampaolo Arachi () and Alessandro Santoro

Taxation from ATAX, University of New South Wales

Abstract: The paper aims to provide a detailed description and evaluation of the Italian experience in tax auditing and enforcement for SMEs which we believe may have some lessons for developing countries with similar sized shadow economies and large numbers of micro-enterprises. We focus on an audit strategy known as “Studi di settore”, which roughly translates as “business sector analyses”, which relies on statistical methods to select the taxpayers to be audited. We show how Studi di settore can be used as an audit rule or as a presumptive tax and we compare it with optimal audit rules and with alternative presumptive taxes on the basis of the available evidence for Italy. We discuss whether Studi di settore may be a useful policy tool for establishing presumptive taxation for SMEs in developing countries when resources for tax auditing are scarce. A presumptive regime may naturally evolve in a full-fledged audit selection mechanism following the development of the private and public sectors.

Keywords: tax evasion; shadow economy; SMEs; audit strategies; presumptive taxation; Italy; developing countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2008-01-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-cse, nep-eec and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.atax.unsw.edu.au/ejtr
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.atax.unsw.edu.au/ejtr [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.atax.unsw.edu.au:443/ejtr)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nsw:discus:523

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.atax.unsw.edu.au/research

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Taxation from ATAX, University of New South Wales Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Research Assistant ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).