• Guidance Note

Managing the Distribution of Property Tax Bills

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Distributing tax bills is an administrative function that is foundational to effective property taxation. However, bill distribution is often overlooked in reform programs in lower-income countries that tend to focus on issues of property identification, valuation, facilitating payments, and compliance. This guidance note reviews the challenges to effective property tax bill distribution in lower-income countries, before describing a tried and tested approach that relies on GPS coordinates to identify properties and sequence bill printing and delivery. The guidance note discusses the trade-offs of several policy decisions related to bill distribution, including outsourcing printing and delivery and using mobile applications to track and verify delivery. The guidance note concludes with a discussion of some potential alternative strategies for effective bill distribution.

Authors

Technical Consultant

Doctoral Fellow

Chair

Publication Details

Xaver Schenker

Technical Consultant

Xaver is an independent technical expert who has been collaborating and leading on a variety of projects with LoGRI. After his MSc. in Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon, he worked at a Research and Knowledge Center for Development Economics on projects in Guinea-Bissau and Angola. Subsequently, Xaver joined ICTD and went on to lead the property tax reform in Freetown, Sierra Leone, while conducting a variety of other consultancies with regards to local government revenue reforms across the globe. In his role as an independent technical consultant he continues to collaborate with LoGRI and other stakeholders on a number of reform projects and other consultancies.


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Graeme Stewart-Wilson

Doctoral Fellow

Wilson Prichard

Chair

Dr Wilson Prichard is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and Department of Political Science, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Executive Director of the ICTD and Chair of the LoGRI program. His research focuses on the political economy of tax reform in lower-income countries and the relationship between taxation and citizen demands for improved governance in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa.  He is the authors of Taxation, Responsiveness and Accountability in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Dynamics of Tax Bargaining (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Taxing Africa: Coercion, Reform and Development (Zed Press, 2018) and Innovations in Tax Compliance: Building Trust, Navigating Politics and Tailoring Reform (World Bank, 2022), along with a range of academic articles.


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