We currently know very little about the taxation of professionals in Africa-scholarly work on this group of taxpayers is scant. The little research that does exist is located within the literature on the taxation of the 'hard-to-tax', a term in tax evasion literature that refers to farmers, small and medium-sized enterprises, and professionals. However, scholarly discourse on the hard-to-tax in low-and middle-income countries, particularly in Africa, has focused primarily on farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises. Professionals are rarely critically considered, despite the acknowledgement in the literature that, considering their potential earnings, the absolute amount involved in evasion by professionals in low-and middle-income countries is probably higher than farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises. This paper begins from the premise that it is sensible to begin to focus more seriously on self-employed professionals in the policy and administrative efforts aimed at increasing tax collection from the informal sector in Africa. Proceeding on that premise, the author provides three lessons that we can learn from a Kenyan case study on taxing selfemployed professionals in Africa.

No abstract

Income earned through gig platforms, letting platforms, and other digital intermediaries presents new challenges for taxation. This article evaluates the efforts of three European Union Member States – Denmark, Estonia, and France – to obtain data on platform users’ earnings directly from platform companies, including Uber, Airbnb, and domestic platforms. The authors furthermore assess the viability of scaling up the national initiatives into an EU-level “Digital Single Window” that would facilitate the automated reporting of income data by platforms, and the forwarding of that data to national tax and social security agencies for taxation and collection according to national rules.

No abstract

This article considers non-compliance with tax legislation by self-employed professionals, using qualitative data on the tax compliance attitudes of lawyers and dentists in Kenya. The main argument is that corruption and inadequate service delivery, over which the revenue authority has no control, lower tax morale and limit the effectiveness of trust in the authority in increasing voluntary compliance. It is further argued that, under such circumstances, stringent detection and enforcement measures would be more helpful in enhancing these taxpayers’ compliance. This research contributes to the literature on the slippery slope framework on trust and power; most of the empirical work on the framework derives from countries with lower levels of corruption and better public service delivery than most African countries. Thus, this article enhances the understanding of the relationship between trust and power in the context of tax compliance among professionals in Kenya and provides some beneficial insight that may be relevant for other African countries. Tax evasion, trust, power, corruption, tax administration, audits, cooperative compliance, slippery slope framework, Kenya, Africa