Domestic & International Taxation Policy, Law & Practice

The programme proceeded from a premise long settled in fiscal sociology, namely that the capacity of a state to tax is inseparable from its capacity to govern, and that the revenue bargain struck between a treasury and its taxpayers records, in ledgers and in statutes alike, the deeper settlement of power within a society. For jurisdictions across the African continent this history is neither abstract nor neutral, since the international rules that allocate taxing rights were drafted in rooms in which those jurisdictions were absent, and the treaty networks they inherited frequently surrender to the residence state precisely the base that a capital importing economy most needs to retain.

Across the ten days the delegation examined how the digital economy has loosened the connection between where profit is booked and where value is genuinely created, how illicit financial flows move value through structures that are individually lawful yet collectively abusive, and how the interpretive craft of reading a charging provision word by word remains the first and most durable defence a revenue authority possesses.