The International Tax Dialogue (ITD) was initiated in April 2002 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) , Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and World Bank (WB) , partly in response to the Monterrey Financing for Development call for enhanced international dialogue on tax matters. It is a joint initiative intended to encourage and facilitate discussion of tax matters among national tax officials, regional tax organisations, and international organisations.
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) began participating as a partner in September 2005, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) arm of the World Bank Group began participation in December 2007 and the European Commission (EC) in late 2008. A joint programme of work was established with the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in 2009. The ITD decided in January 2011 to encourage also the UN and ATAF to join the ITD. Finally, Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT) replaced DFID in the ITD partnership in 2011. There is also a close collaboration between the ITD and the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (IBFD).
The ITD Secretariat is currently hosted by the OECD in Paris, France.
Members of the ITD Secretariat are: Alan Carter, Ana Cebreiro, Reka Mazur, Sébastien Michon
Core to the mandate of the ITD is sharing information and avoiding a duplication of effort within the group of members. To facilitate this two to three Steering Group meetings are held per year, in addition to maintaining regular contact via email and teleconferences. The last Steering Group meeting was held on 10 January 2011 in Washington DC.
Key to our activity is also the maintenance and development of the ITD website which is considered a knowledge platform for countries to share documents, knowledge and experience quickly, easily, and globally. All countries are invited to use this free and openly accessible site and to make contributions.
Furthermore, the ITD has recently got engaged in the work of the Domestic Resource Mobilization pillar of the Seoul Consensus. In this context, our aim is to contribute to a great extent to the fulfilment of the G20 mandate.
In pursuing our aim for the ITD to be a central point of reference and a reliable source of information on all international tax matters at global level, we place a lot of emphasize on the publication of professional comparative or research studies in the field.
As such, a pilot study on "Revenue Administration in Sub-Saharan Africa" has recently been completed. 20 countries were invited to participate in this pilot, and 15 completed the process in the end. Topics include: institutional arrangements, organisational structures, management, resources, operational performance, legal frameworks and an outline of major processes, for example return filing, collection and assessment. This is the first publication in the ITD’s planned series to include extended follow-up studies with a wider regional coverage.
For the 2007 global conference , a similar survey-based comparative study of the tax treatment of SMEs was developed with a broad range of participating countries and resulting in a truly global picture on the topic.
We also recommend you to browse through our conference pages for more information on our biennial global and regular regional conferences which usually discuss questions of high relevance on the actual international tax agenda.