Setting Property Taxes in Punjab--论文代写范文精选

税收计算通过适当的乘数大小，以及土地和建筑物的属性。税收支付到指定银行分行，付款收据给纳税人的时候,银行还提供了一种税吏和副本。几个地方限制税收扭曲，引入大量的腐败空间。下面的essay代写范文进行讲述。

Abstract 
Punjab is Pakistan’s most populous province: its population of over 80 million would rank fifteenth in the world were it a country. Property tax collection in Punjab is roughly a fifth of the level of comparable countries (World Bank 2006), due to a wide variety of problems such as a narrow tax base, inadequate (in reflecting market value) and infrequently updated valuation tables, generous exemptions, tax evasion and corruption, distrust of public institutions, and administrative weaknesses (Bahl, Wallace and Cyan 2008,GHK 2009, World Bank 2006, World Bank 2009). The property tax in Punjab is levied on the gross annual rental value (GARV) of the property, which is computed by formula. 

Specifically, the GARV is determined by measuring the square footage of the land and buildings on the property, and then multiplying by standardized values from a valuation table that depend only on the property location and occupancy type. These valuation tables divide the province into seven categories (A to G) according to the extent of facilities and infrastructure in the area, with a different rate for each category. Rates further vary by residential, commercial or industrial status, whether it is owner-occupied or rented, and location (i.e., on or off a main road). The tax is calculated by applying the appropriate multiplier to the size of the land and buildings on the property. Taxes are paid into designated bank branches (through the National Bank of Pakistan). 

A copy of the receipt of payment is given to the taxpayer at the time of payment, and the bank also provides a copy to the tax-collector and a copy to the provincial Treasury. Several distortions place constraints on tax collection and introduce substantial scope for corruption. These distortions include substantially different rates for residential and commercial properties (which can be easily reclassified), as well as granting exemptions to widows, the disabled, owners of plots below 5 marlas (about 125 square meters), retired federal and provincial employees, and religious charitable institutions (World Bank 2006). 

The two most notable distortions are between owner-occupied and rented residential properties (the latter are taxed ten times more) and between residential and commercial properties (the latter are taxed between 3 and 6 times more). Qualitative evidence suggests that these distortions are the main ways in which tax evasion takes place both due to a significant impact these margins have on tax assessment and also given that it is less easy to verify whether a residential property is being rented or not or, particularly for mixed usage properties, what fraction of the property is being used for commercial purposes. For research purposes, a methodological advantage of property taxes is that, unlike most taxes, true property tax liability can be independently estimated by the researcher. By comparing official tax payments to an independent assessment by an external survey team, we can determine changes both the accuracy of tax evasion and the average level of over or under taxation. This approach follows other examples of this type of approach in the corruption literature (e.g., Fisman and Wei 2004; Olken 2007).

Property tax administration 
The primary unit of tax collection is the “tax circle,” a predefined geographically contiguous area that covers anywhere from a two to ten thousand unique properties/taxpayers. The substantial variation in circle both in terms of property numbers and total assessed value is due to differential usage and growth of urban areas and a slow-moving circle “boundary redrawing” process. Within each circle there are three designated tax officers who work together as a team: an “inspector,” who determines tax assessments and issues notices that demand payment, a “clerk,” who is in charge of record keeping, and a “constable,” who assists the inspector in the field. 

Together, they maintain a record of all properties, apply valuation tables to individual properties, and determine what property tax rates and exemptions apply to the property. Following this process, the inspector determines each property’s tax liability, and sends an annual demand notice to the property owner for payment at a bank. The inspector is the head of this three-person team. In practice, while a circle will almost always have an inspector, at times the clerk or constable position may remain vacant due to hiring frictions and freezes. All three officials are part of the provincial career bureaucracy with wages determined by salary band and length of service. 

As is common for civil servants in developing economies, tax officials receive fairly low wages that are rarely, if ever, tied to performance. Moreover, for a typical tax collector there are few avenues for vertical mobility through promotions. While there are desired circle postings (larger tax circles and those in more urban areas), transfers are often more politically based rather than merit based (Piracha and Moore, 2013). However, unlike other departments such as education and health, the tax department does have explicit financial targets it has to meet each year. 

While these are mostly based on a given year’s budgetary requirements or a simpler year-on-year increase (without any way to account for actual urban growth rates), these targets are passed down to each (of several) progressively smaller administrative tax unit all the way down to the smallest unit, the tax circle. Since each higher unit has corresponding tax officials, the normal mode of collecting against these targets is through each administrative level pressuring and cajoling lower levels to increase collections. Ultimately since the three-person tax circle team is the one with primary access to information about the taxpayers, these tactics would need to impact their behavior to have an impact. 

But, with limited reward mechanisms, threats of transfers are the primarily tool available, but since these are in turn largely based on political pressure these are not always credible to carry out. The system thus leaves considerable opportunities for leakages, collusion, and low collection, especially because there are few independent checks on the actions of the tax circle team and limited audit/inspection mechanisms. The property database is manually recorded on physical registers, and does not automatically include new properties or property updates. Since there is no automatic link between building permits (when issued) and tax rolls, there is no way for the government to learn about these changes due to construction or changes in property use unless they are detected and officially reported by the circle staff. 

In addition, officials may employ significant discretion in applying valuation tables to individual properties and determining exemptions. For example, properties can be incorrectly designated as owner-occupied when they are being rented out (and as noted above, the latter are taxed at a ten times higher rate), classified as residential when they are in fact commercial, designated as “off road” when they are on a main road, or mismeasured. Finally, the manual system of billing and collection, which tax bills are hand-written by inspectors and clerks and hand-delivered by tax constables, is prone to errors and/or manipulation in crediting collections. Given the incompleteness of property records, the complexities of joint family property rights, the informality of most rental arrangements, and the fact that the manual official records are only kept at the circle level, verification of how the tax officials at circle level use their discretion is extremely difficult. 

Should they want to increase total revenue collected (say, in response to incentives), tax officials can do so in a variety of ways. Collectors likely have substantial private information regarding a property’s true tax liability that they may choose not to reveal to the authorities. Thus schemes that reward on revenue collected may increase tax collected by incentivizing tax collectors to reveal such information. Extreme forms of such information disclosure is revealing the existence of (newly constructed) properties and formally adding them to tax registers (recall there is no automatic process though which this happens). In addition, tax collectors may increase valuations by revealing the true (and higher) tax valuation of a property or denying (incorrectly provided) exemptions. The same margins can also respond to inspector effort in obtaining more accurate information on the new construction or changed status of properties or simply by visiting non-paying households to encourage them to pay, through a combination of social pressure and the threat of legal sanctions (such as summons by the tax office or, ultimately, sealing the property so it cannot be accessed until tax bills are paid).（essay代写)

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