The Costs of VAT: A Review of the Literature

The newest CASE Network Report on VAT systems provides a review of literature on the definition and measurement of the administrative and compliance costs of taxation. The authors Luca Barbone,  Richard Bird and Jaime Vázquez Caro review in their paper compliance burdens linked to intra-EU trade and related reporting requirements.

In the second part, the paper focuses on phenomena of VAT evasion and fraud, with special focus on EU countries, where fraud is facilitated by the lack of EU mechanism to back up national administrations.

This report was prepared within a European Commission Directorate-General Taxation sponsored project "The retrospective evaluation of elements of the VAT system". The final report was published in December 2011.