ISP Working Paper Number 07-11

How should Individuals be Taxed? Combining "Simplified", Income, and Payroll Taxes in Ukraine

James Alm, Pablo Saavedra, and Edward Sennoga, June 2007

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Abstract:

Individuals in most all countries face a wide range of direct taxes on their income, especially variants of the individual income tax and payroll taxes. For the income tax, attempts are often made to reduce the compliance and administrative costs of the tax by using “presumptive” or “simplified” methods, in which the tax liability is determined indirectly from some simple indicators that are more easily measured than the “true” tax base itself. However, when a “simplified” income tax is combined with other direct taxes on individuals, the ways in which these taxes interact, their combined effects on revenues, resource allocation, and income distribution, and the appropriate design of the overall system of these taxes remain unresolved – and unexplored – issues. This paper examines these issues, focusing on the experience of Ukraine . A simple computable general equilibrium model is used to quantify many of the effects of the “system” of simplified, income, and payroll taxes.