Tax administration reform in certain African Tax Administration Forum members in Southern Africa

Abstract

During an annotation project of 60 000 Afrikaans tokens by CTexT (North-West University), the developers had to answer difficult questions with regard to the annotation of the participle specifically. One of the main reasons for this difficulty is that the different sources that offer descriptions of the participle in Afrikaans are conflicting in such descriptions and, depending on which source is consulted, would provide different annotations. In order to clarify the uncertainty of how the participle in Afrikaans should be annotated, the available literature was surveyed to determine the exact nature of the participle in Afrikaans. The descriptions of the participle in Afrikaans were further si During August 2008 commissioners, senior tax administrators and policy makers from 28 African countries attended the International Conference on Taxation, State Building and Capacity Development in Africa. The objective of the conference had been to investigate how African countries can improve their resource mobilization, thereby decreasing Africa’s reliance on foreign aid, improving the fiscal independence of African countries and improving the living conditions of their citizens. It was identified during the conference that African countries can improve their resource mobilization through an improvement of their existing taxation structures. An improvement in existing taxation structures could in turn be achieved through improved sharing of information between African tax authorities on their tax structures currently in place, as well as the habits of their respective taxpayers. In order to facilitate the improved sharing of information, as well as to better equip African Tax Administrations for the task at hand, the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) was formed. The aim of this research is to determine whether any progress has been made regarding tax administration reform by African countries following the Conference on Taxation, State Building and Capacity Development in Africa, during the period 2008 to 2012. This has been determined by evaluating the structures of the ATAF and the activities implemented by the ATAF during the period 2008 to 2012 to meet its initial strategic objectives. Secondly, African countries that were previously members of SADC, and have since become members of the ATAF as well, were evaluated in order to determine whether the countries in question have implemented tax administration and governance reforms during the period 2008 to 2012, which have led to an improvement in the tax administration and governance structures of the countries in question. Furthermore, an evaluation was performed as to whether the improvements have led to an improvement in the fiscal independence and humanitarian conditions of the countries in question, during the period 2008 to 2012. The conclusion arrived at reveals that the ATAF has implemented several activities during the period 2008 to 2012, to meet its initial strategic objectives. Furthermore, all the analysed African countries have improved their tax administration structures during the period 2008 to 2012. Unfortunately, not all the countries analysed have been able to improve their governance structures during the period 2008 to 2012 as well. However, where a country has been able to improve both its tax administration and governance structures during the period 2008 to 2012, its fiscal independence and humanitarian conditions have also improved during the period 2008 to 2012.tuated in the context of how participles are described in English and Dutch. The conclusion that was reached is that the participle form of the verb in Afrikaans should be distinguished from the periphrastic construction form of the verb that appears in the past and the passive constructions. Furthermore, this study determined to what extent a cognitive usage-based descriptive framework could contribute towards a better understanding of the participle in Afrikaans. The first conclusion that was reached is that a characterisation of the participle within this framework enables one to make conceptual sense of the morphological structure of the participle. The study shows how the morphological structure of the participle is responsible for the fact that the verbal character of the participle stays intact while the participle functions as another word class. Another conclusion that was reached regarding the characterisation of the past and passive constructions from a cognitive usage-based descriptive framework is that the framework makes it possible to distinguish conceptually between the periphrastic form of the verb and the participle form of the verb. Lastly, the study determined to what extent new insights into the participle in Afrikaans could lead to alternative lemmatisation and part-of-speech-tagging of participles in the NCHLT-corpus. The conclusion that was reached is that participles are primarily lemmatised satisfactorily. Proposals that are made in order to improve the lemmatisation protocol, include: (i) distinguishing in the protocol between periphrastic forms of the verb and the participle form of the verb; (ii) repeating the guideline for the lemmatisation of compound verbs that was provided for verb lemmatisation under the lemmatisation guidelines for participles; (iii) adding more lexicalised adjectives to the existing list in the protocol; and (iv) suggesting a guideline that would allow one to consistently distinguish between participles that could function as adverbs as well as participles that could function as prepositions. The conclusion that was reached after the analysis of the part-of-speech protocol is that the part-of-speech tag set in Afrikaans does not allow for the specific attributes and values of participles to be taken into account. Participles in the Afrikaans tag set are tagged strictly according to the function of the word. Although such an approach is very practical, it results in a linguistically poorer part-of-speech tag that ignores the verbal character of the participle. An alternative strategy is therefore suggested for the part-of-speech tagging of participles in which the attributes and values of the verb tag are adapted.