UP partners with UNSW and SAICA for a international VAT symposium

The Department of Taxation at the University of Pretoria held a two-day symposium on 19 and 20 October 2016, co-hosted by the School of Business from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

The main theme of the symposium was ‘Value-added taxation (VAT) in Developing Countries: Policy, Law and Practice’. The symposium was an invitation-only event with 32 participants from 13 different countries. The participants comprised leading global VAT scholars, VAT policy-makers, VAT practitioners and emerging VAT academics from developing economies. The main aim of the symposium was to expose the emerging academics to the established international VAT role-players through the presentation of a paper co-authored with an established VAT scholar. The topics from the papers presented and discussed at the symposium were extremely relevant to African developing countries, especially South Africa and member countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

The topics presented and discussed at the symposium were:

• Learning from experience: what is a good VAT and what is a bad VAT?
• Supranational and subnational issues: regional VAT co-operation between groups of countries.
• Evaluating VAT efficiency.
• Legal architecture: the legal design of VAT legislation.
• Getting the design right on specific VAT-related problem areas.
• Intermediaries, compliance and compliance costs.

This symposium made an important contribution towards the development of tax academics and researchers on the African continent. In addition, the papers presented at the symposium will be peer-reviewed for a special edition of the Australian Tax Forum, an A-rated journal on the Australian Dean’s List.

The event was sponsored by the South African Institute of Chartered Accounts (SAICA), together with contributions by the Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at UP, Prof Elsabé Loots, the UNSW School of Business, LexisNexis and Profs Rick Krever, Chris Evans and Binh Tran-Nam.

Please click here to view the papers presented