Digitalization of tax administration and its analytical potential

Abstract

Various state agencies accumulate and publish a significant amount of data, but the Russian public authorities commonly use official data of the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) for administration purposes. At the same time, the digitalization of tax administration (the registration of the taxpayers, the receipt of tax reporting, and lately direct access to accounting data) makes possible the usage of tax statistics for public administration purposes. The authors use the reports of Rosstat to show their analytical potential and more realistic nature in comparison to data of Rosstat. The Federal Tax Service publishes statistics on tax revenues, tax expenses and taxpayers for major taxes, with breakdown by regions and municipalities. This makes feasible the detailed analysis of trends in income and property in the economy, welfare in particular regions and municipalities, amount of tax expenditure and other areas of economy. The limitation is, the tax statistics deals only with the items recorded in the tax returns, and therefore many issues may go unnoticed.