PRESENTATION: Poland: Sealing Tax Gap
Since 2016, Poland has systematically implemented a number of actions which helped to significantly reduce the tax gap by about 50 percent. In parallel, as part of broader reforms to improve effectiveness and create synergies, Poland merged the customs and tax administration into one body, the National Revenue Administration (NRA), which became operational in March 2017. According to the European Commission, Poland’s VAT compliance gap (the difference between the liability under full compliance and revenue) between 2010 and 2015 was around 25 percent of the revenue, representing approximately PLN 40 billion of lost revenues each year because of VAT noncompliance. Tax revenues were lost to large-scale fraud, more specifically missing trader and carousel fraud, and also to forms of evasion (e.g., underreporting, non-filing), tax avoidance (e.g., misalignment of rates), errors, omissions, and bankruptcies..
During this session, the speakers presented how estimates of tax gaps in Poland, especially in VAT, helped to diagnose the compliance issues, what measures including both changes in the tax policy and tax administration have been introduced and applied to reduce the gaps, and what remains to be done to sustain and further close the gaps.