Journal of Tax Research
Year:2010 | Volume:NEW SERIES - 18 | Issue:8 (56)|Papers Count:10

Iran’s tax system indicators, such as lower ratio of taxes to GDP and funding resources, tax pressure on companies in direct tax bases and focus on import tariffs in indirect tax bases, indicate that the structure of tax system in Iran is not desirable. Comparison between corporate tax and income tax that the latter includes all income in economy, indicates an imbalance, injustice and inefficiency in collecting taxes on income, and shows that economic agents, despite companies, do not pay taxes proportional to their income. In the case of indirect tax, there is not a general consumption or sale taxes, and what exist under this title, just include excise taxes and very limited kind of VAT.To improve Iran's tax system, in this paper, we provide structural reforms as follow: we first introduce two new tax bases, in this area the environmental and local taxes are provided, the second reform is to improve the performance of the available tax bases, include direct and indirect taxes, in this area two tax bases include global income tax and VAT are presented. Finally, in respect to implementing policies related to economic evolution project, especially in the energy sector, essential tax policies for saving energy are provided.

Value Added Tax (VAT) law is one of the important economic laws in Iran. After design and approval of VAT law in Iran’s parliament, it has been implemented since October 2009. However, from one set of such tax law, some challenges, disputes and concerns arised by economic agents and activists. Finally, such events and other similar cases would lead to a change in enforcement of the VAT act. Hypotheses investigated in this paper are as follows.1. Lack of facilities and poor law-executive infrastructure of lran’s economy have been main obstacles for a full implementation of the value added tax law in relation to trade unions and businesses.2. Lack of attention to certain exchange transactions of goods and services with special features such as Gold and jewelry has led to non-compliance behavior of some activists with respect to execution of the VAT law.3. Lack of adequate training of taxpayers and economic activists poor information about executive details of the VAT act has resulted to some resistances against implementation of the VAT act.

The purpose of the present paper is to study the relationship between government efficiency and fiscal freedom indexes in organization of Islamic conference countries (OIC) for the period 1995-20080 According to Heritage Foundation, fiscal freedom is a qualitative index that the lowest level of tax is the highest level of fiscal freedom. Our findings based on econometrics estimated panel data method shows a negative relationship between government efficiency and fiscal freedom. The significant testing confirms the relationship between government efficiency and fiscal freedom is significant in the level of 5 percent.

Taxable capacity is an economic capacity of a given country, the extent to which taxpayers can tolerate the burden of all types of taxes (i.e. the degree to which taxes could be paid). Taxable capacity is difficult to estimate. The related important issue is to review how tax revenue as a part of state revenue is increased. To achieve this objective, a precise estimation and recognition of current resources are necessary. Appropriate criteria for calculating taxable capacity is the tax bases of the different economic sectors, so value added of sectors is also calculated. In this study, modelling of neural network is applied in which independent variables enters neural network learning system as an input layer. The input variables of the model including inflation rate, Gini coefficient, the ratio of the urban population to the total population, the degree of economic openness and value added share of agriculture and industry sectors as a percent of GDP, these are dependent variables of the model and taxable capacity is dependent variable which is regarded as output layer in neural network. Neural network is appropriately selected according to the trial and error method for the hidden layers and each layer's nodes. In this learning model, intra network method (batch) and multi perceptron layer approach (MPL) have been used as progressive and feedback.

Effective tax rate is one of the most important tax efficiency criteria in tax literature. Moreover, tax system efficiency is usually measured by bilateral comparison between administrative costs and effective tax rate. By examination and estimation of effective tax rate, tax authorities are able to increase tax justice and investigate tax burden on taxpayers. Effective tax rate could be an instrument to direct capitals, as well as its wide using in policy-making and economic decisions. In present paper an attempt is made to estimate effective tax rate in business and corporate income tax. The results show that effective corporate tax rate had an increasing trend from 6.08 to 11.59 during 2001 to 2008 while effective business tax rate has been decreased by 2.1 to 1.3 between 2001 and 2007.

Energy resources are critical for economic development in different countries and fossil fuels (specially 5 oil products) are the most important resources that are used. By usage of these fuels, we have decrease in the reserves and completion of the resources in one hand and air pollution and climatic changes on the other hand. The pattern of energy usage in both production and consumption sectors of country is inadequate which rank Iran’s position low in terms of energy efficiency and lead to environmental problems too. According to the survey in theoretical and practical solutions in Environmental Economics, environmental indirect taxes are appropriate financial way to reduce oil product’s consumption in Iran regarding economic efficiency. In this research we analyzed the time series data of consumption of Gasoline, Gas oil, Fuel oil, Kerosene and Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) by using Vector Auto Regressive (VAR) model. The effect of environmental taxes on market (as an upward price shock) of the consumption of these oil products and the reaction of consumption to the shock were also reviewed. According to Granger Causality test, the causal relation from price and national income variables to consumption variable has been confirmed. According to the results of research, taxation on Gasoline, oil gas, fuel oil and LPG reduces increasing trend of their consumption, but taxation on kerosene increases this product Consumption.

Due to the problems such as large and increasing volume of tax returns, lack of pre-assessment, time limit and lack of standards for tax auditing, limited manpower, the arbitrary judgment in this field and failure to provide tax returns by some taxpayers, a new approach is needed to solve these problems. The present research aims to apply the most efficient up-to-date methods and techniques of the world (chaos theory and artificial neural network theory) by which Iranian National Tax Administration (INTA) would be capable of computerized assessment of tax returns on the basis of the difference percentage between declared and forecasted pre-tax incomes and select tax returns with the greatest risks and refer them to the tax auditors for auditing. In this regard, the chaotic time series variable would be forecasted by artificial neural network non-linear model. The required data has been gathered through a library method. Parsportfolio Data Management Software has been used for collecting the data of companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, the research has used the statistics published by Iranian Statistics Centre (ISC), Central Bank of Islamic Republic of Iran (CBI) and (INTA).

The present research aims to evaluate the role of tax audit in tax system and reduce the expectation gap between auditors, legal entities and tax organization. Different indicators can be used to evaluate the role of auditing in the tax system. Here four dimensions have been used to determine audit expectation gap which include consideration of accounting standards and tax regulations, time intervals between: assessing and issuing notice of assessment, notice of assessment and final assessment, final assessment and collection and enforcement. Statistical population of this research is legal entities of west Tehran tax offices who welcomed tax audit for over 5 consecutive years 2002-2006. Required information has been acquired by document mining method (real data on tax files). T-test and t-value has been used for testing research hypotheses. According to this research, tax auditing accelerates tax collection, reduces tax lags and enhances the quality of tax reports by taxpayers.