 Good morning. I'm Teresa Clark, and I'm the chairman and the executive editor of Africa.com. Thank you for joining us today for this conversation on tax in motion. We have an excellent panel of academics, policymakers, and in particular a minister from Zambia who's going to provide us with some very useful insights as we tackle this very complicated question that we're facing at the beginning of 2024. As global and national debt grow, adequate tax systems are essential to support public goods and ensure that governments can run effectively, as the minister would know. However, there are massive divergences between tax regimes, profit shifting across jurisdictions, and new economic and technological models that make existing methods of calculation irrelevant. How can current efforts to reform the tax code be put into action? And what innovations are there to ensure that it's fit for the future? This session will be 45 minutes, and we will take time for questions at the end, so if you have any questions, please prepare to ask them. Let's provide a little bit more context before we get into the conversation with our group of experts here. Against the backdrop of growing global inequities, rising public debt levels, and multinational profit shifting, taxation is undergoing a significant transformation. Global public debt reached an all-time high of $92 trillion in 2022, which is a five-fold surge from 2000, and the most in almost six decades. Rising inequalities are straining the systems with concerning spikes over the last five years. Multinational enterprises continue to leverage a disparate global tax landscape with the OECD estimating annual losses of countries between $100 and $240 billion USD. The confluence of factors has led to increased pressure on governments to increase tax revenues and reform tax codes. Countries continue to innovate at the national level and are increasingly adopting digital technologies in order to improve tax administration. At the same time, momentum for tax reform at the global level is gathering along different lines of thought. With the 2021 OECD G20 inclusive framework on base erosion and profit shifting and the recently adopted UN resolution on international tax cooperation at the UN, two visions to reshape the future of global taxation are on the table today. So with global consensus for change, what new solutions are needed to make fiscal fit for purpose and where are the global tax system heading? So today, to tackle this issue, we have four experts as I've already mentioned. I will start immediately to my left with Minister Situmbeko Mascutwane, who is the Minister of Finance and National Planning of Zambia. Thank you very much for being with us. We have Allison Schrager, who's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in the U.S. Thank you, Allison. Lucas Chancel, who's an associate professor at Sciences Poe in France and also a visiting professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard. And Amitabh Bahar, who's the executive director at Interim at Oxfam International in Kenya. Thank you all for joining us. Let me start with you. Can I start with you, Chancel? Can I ask you a question? How can we ensure that tax systems are equitable and capable of supporting public goods in the face of growing global and national debt? Well, thank you for the invitation. I think maybe the starting point of this conversation is realizing the growing public spending and public investment needs in the coming decades. So climate change is going to require a significant increase in investments from all actors, but the public sector will have to massively invest in solutions and also in compensation of potential losers. And this is going to further increase the needs for public resources. And so governments might want to choose to, you know, increase debt levels. That might be one solution. That might be partly what some governments might choose to do, but surely not everything will be financed through debt, especially given the context that you've just highlighted. And so taxes, from my perspective, will have to be increased in order to finance these new needs. And then the question is how do we increase these taxes in a way that is fair, in a way that is equitable, in a way that small and medium businesses do not feel that, again, they will pay higher tax rates than the large businesses. And in a way that the working in the middle classes in many countries do not feel that they also pay higher tax rates than very wealthy individuals, because this is effectively what has happened over the past 40 years. The big actors, large multinational companies and centimillionaires have been paying lower tax rates as a share of their revenues than the rest of the population. And you know, the theme of this event, of this Davos conference is rebuilding trust. And clearly this definitely undermines trust in proportions that are even hard to imagine. And what also undermines trust, I feel, is when we say, when the global committee says, okay, we've cracked this, we've solved this with this 15% multinational minimum corporate tax rate, signed in 2021, we've solved the problem. Actually, we're very far from having solved the problem of tax justice in this world. For one thing, the 15% minimum tax, in fact, is still much lower than what small and medium businesses pay in most countries in this world. Now, one solution would be to say, okay, let's reduce the 15% tax rate for small and medium businesses to 15% so that everybody pays the same. But then where do you get your resources to invest in public goods? So, we really need to fix these loopholes at the top of the tax system. It's always better when we do this collectively with 140 countries. But I really think that we should not, countries should not wait for 140 countries agreement to move forward. And we've seen that some countries have been front runners here. The US, for instance, when they ask for automatic exchange of bank information, that's a way to close some of the loopholes to ensure that people pay their taxes. Some countries have implemented wealth taxes on the very wealthy. Some European countries think that's a way forward. And I think that's where countries need to continue going. Otherwise, trust will not be there. And resources will not be there to invest in climate change and all these other challenges. Thank you very much. These are good opening remarks to frame this conversation. Minister, may I turn to you? You're sitting in a position where you have to make these decisions and they're real people who depend on the policies that you put in place. Can you share with us your view on this, and especially over the last few years in Southern Africa? Yes, thank you very much. Let me start by saying that true broad themes that shape our thinking as we push on with the matters regarding taxation. Firstly, it is indeed true that there are elements within our societies that do not pay their full share of tax because they just choose to willfully avoid the taxes. As you know, Zambia is a mining country, and one of the things that we have noticed is that there are a number of, especially the small mining companies, the small mining companies all over the place and their contribution to the tax net is we estimate that to be limited. So we are addressing this, riding on technology, applying the latest technology, borrowing from what others have done. This is going to be one of our key objectives starting in 2024 how to bring these people into the tax net because they must pay taxes. So that is something that we are running with. Second issue that we are running with, let's not forget that countries such as Zambia and I suspect many other African countries, including South Africa, our biggest problem right now is unemployment, youth unemployment. We are seeing engineers graduating, economists, lawyers and so forth. They have jobs and because they have no jobs, they cannot pay taxes. So our responsibility is to create jobs so that we have decent human beings that we can decently provide for in our countries. But of course as we provide jobs, they also pay taxes. So for us, apart from focusing on those who are dodging from taxes, we see tax is a very important instrument to create jobs. Now in the past, I think sometime there's been a tendency to think that we can grow ourselves out of poverty by imposing tax rates that are well beyond those that comparable countries would be imposing. And this is very common in the mining sector for example in the case of Zambia and many other countries. You impose very high rates thinking that you solve your problems of debt, you solve your problems of how to build infrastructure. What do you see? The end result is that the investment that must come in to exploit the natural resources and do other things, that investment declines. To give you a specific example in the case of Zambia, between 2010 and now, between 2010 and now, while no single mine was opened in Zambia, Copa Mine, in fact they were closing across the border in DRC, new mines were opening. So today DRC produces more than 2 million tons of Copa. Ten years ago, they were only doing 400,000, 400,000 tons. Today they are producing more than 2 million tons. Where is Zambia? It's still stuck at the level where it was. What has been the problem? The tax regime in Zambia was way out of line. Our detractors will say, you are giving incentives, we are not giving incentives. We are just realigning our taxes to what other mining countries are taxing, because ours was way too out. And we paid the penalty for that, instead of investment coming to Zambia, investment went across the border. So therefore, to be able to collect more taxes, the first instance is to realign these taxes to what others are doing, attract investment, produce more, and with more production, more taxes will be paid, more people will be employed to pay the taxes. So for us, that is now the theme of how can we also use tax as an instrument for raising investment. And I think the opportunity is great for us, because the minerals that we have, are the minerals that the world is looking for in terms of greening the world economy. The copper, the cobalt, the manganese, the nickel. So this is the time now to realign the taxes with what everybody else does, so that we take advantage of this special window that is open to produce more, create more jobs, and there is taxes infrastructure. Thank you very much for helping us to appreciate the real world implications. We'll come back to the policy of people. And Allison, can you help us think a little bit about how as the world tries to do this harmonizing of tax rates around the world, what are some of the challenges in the different jurisdictions? Well, I mean, certainly for the, say, there's different pillars going forward, at least that the OECD put out in the first one, is increasing taxes on large multinationals. So not only taxing them in the country where they're domain, but also where they're doing sales. And potentially, that could be a good way to raise revenue. But I think we're already seeing reluctance, certainly in the U.S., to pass that. So you do have to contend with, let you know, individual governments and sort of getting aligned on this. And I think that's also becoming a bigger challenge. I mean, it's a very complex plan, and it certainly is causing a lot of uncertainty. And I think that's something we want to be mindful of, because when we're talking about equity, there's two things we want to think about. We want to think about equity within countries, but we also need to think about equity globally. And I was reading your report as I do every year, and I was just so struck by, you know, the inequality between different countries. And so much of getting around that is going to be encouraging investment all around the world, particularly in developing and lowering income countries. So when you're harmonizing, you know, as well, you know, you don't want to create tax havens, but you also want to maintain a level of certainty and transparency so you can encourage more foreign direct investment, because that is probably the best way to sort of share global wealth. Great. Well, Amitabh, Allison has referenced your report. Do you want to share with us a little bit about their conclusions? Sure. So thank you for having me here. But let me start by a couple of framing points. Musk, as we know, is one of the richest man in history. He pays a true tax rate of 3.3%. We as Oxfam work in Uganda with a trader, her name is Christine, and she pays 40%. Something is completely broken in the tax structure that we have. And this is happening in the context, and thank you Allison for the referencing our report. Since 2020, the billionaires have doubled their wealth. The top five have doubled their wealth, and this is the time when 5 billion people have collectively become poorer. Since 2020, billionaires have added $3 trillion to their wealth. And this is happening at a time when 800 million people sleep hungry. In India, the country where I come from, in December, and everybody's celebrating the economic success story of India, but in December, India said that they needed to give food doles to 800 million people. So that's the context we are living in. And there are solutions. One of them is to clearly tax the rich, the super rich, both in terms of income and wealth. And I think it's also extremely critical. Our report this year is particularly shining a light. On how we're entering a era of billionaire supremacy, where you have enormous power in corporations, which are essentially run by a few billionaires. So if you look at just the tax rates, since the 80s in OECD countries, we have half the tax rates now. And you're looking at countries starving one after another for resources to invest in fundamental services, like education, health, drinking water. Sometimes I feel maybe we are far removed sitting at wealth. The countries that I go, I actually see hunger. You do not get safe drinking water. And we are talking about more and more profits for these big corporations. So there's something fundamentally wrong and then that needs to be fixed. So I would say really, as in if it's about rebuilding trust, it's about rebuilding trust with the social contract we have. And these large corporations are eroding trust. And that's a massive threat also to democracy. So I would really, it should be an urgent wake-up call for all of us. If you don't invert this conversation, I worry that we are certainly heading towards extremely turbulent times. So let me just ask you a follow-up question. In the opening remarks and others have mentioned some of the global tax reform efforts that are underway, do you think that they go far enough in addressing the issues of inequality that you're talking about? So we do have the possibility of inequality-busting tax policies. We are happy that President Lula via G20 is now bringing tax as a fundamental work stream. We're happy to see countries like whether it's Colombia, Spain, to start talking about wealth taxation. So there are some efforts happening. But if you ask me, are we going far enough? No. As in there's much more that needs to be done. And that's where I think this growing inequality needs to be brought in. It's not a small fraction of the gap that we are looking at. We're going to completely miss the 1.5 target. And if you look at the enormity of what climate change is doing, as you look at East Africa, five years of drought and sudden floods, which means massive disruption in the agriculture season. More than four million people have been displaced. Where do you get these resources? Good, we talk of loss and damage fund. But the commitments are so small. Where will we get all these resources from? If you don't tax the super rich, the super wealthy, and from our report, let me just quote one more figure because I think that's startling. We are living in an era of cost of living crisis. And it's the same time when the top 100 corporations have paid 80% of their profits to their shareholders. What about this whole conversation in VEF about stakeholder capitalism? What happens to the supply chain? What happens to the place, the agriculture worker from where you procure your raw material? So there are several questions that need to be asked. There is a fundamental need for re-looking at the question of inequality. Minister, let me come back to you for a moment. In your opening remarks, you spoke a lot about your domestic policies and some of the stakeholders internally to Zambia that may not be bearing their fair portion. When we talk about the global efforts, how do any of these global efforts at harmonizing impact a country like Zambia? Will this be a benefit to Zambia? Well, I think from the global efforts as far as we can tell, the key benefit that we can derive out of that is sharing of knowledge and skills. I spoke earlier on what is being done to draw in those mining companies, small mining companies that are not contributing to the tax net in a fair manner. And we think that we are benefiting a lot from what is being done in the world. The technology that is being developed, and I must say that the technology that we are deploying now is technology that we have borrowed from one of the neighboring countries that are far ahead of us in terms of technology. So to the extent that new tools and techniques are being developed, it is something that is of benefit to us. I would also want to say that there is efforts that is going on now to share information across the world on taxpayers, whereby tax authorities are able to exchange information about, I think you called it shifting of profits and stuff like that. We encourage those kind of efforts to continue because we are good consumers, we can benefit a lot from these developments that are taking place. I also want to say finally that we are always talking to each other and even at policy level to be able to learn from colleagues what is it that works and what is it that doesn't work and one of the conclusions that we have drawn is the thinking that a country will become rich, a citizen becomes rich by imposing super heavy taxes out of line with what others are doing. For us, that is a lesson that says don't go in that direction. Finance is a myth of the way that attracts investments, creates wealth, more jobs, more taxation. So I would say that these are some of the elements through which we are learning from our interactions with the rest of the world. So Lucas, you hear what the ministers had to say about needing to be competitive relative to other jurisdictions. Can you comment from your perspective on what some of the challenges are to harmonizing the tax regimes across different jurisdictions? Maybe starting by saying that over the past 40 years there has often been this implicit assumption that tax evasion, whether legal or not, was something that countries couldn't really do something about. Tax evasion was, you know, it was there. It had to be taken for granted. But the truth is that this is not a law of nature. Tax evasion is not something that is imposed on us like gravity. It's something that governments can actually act against. So it's always better when we get together as a global community and we discuss about what should be the actual tax rate and the set of rules that are going to go with it. And that's the ideal way to do it. But even as a set of countries or even a single country who would like to move forward on these issues, there are options. So there are things like exit taxes, for instance, when very wealthy individuals decide that, okay, I do not want to pay taxes in this country anymore so I don't want to be a resident of this country anymore. I'm going out. Well, some countries have exit taxes to try to compensate for the fact that these persons created a lot of wealth probably because they were very clever individuals, probably also because the government was providing them with a set of infrastructures of public services, of education systems, of cultural systems, whatever, that made them be able to enrich themselves. So exit taxes is really something that countries can do and of course it's always better than countries harmonize all that. But that's my first point. Tax evasion, whether legal or not, is not a law of nature and there are many things that governments can do in order to act against it. Maybe the second point here is that when we look at how the negotiations on the 15% global minimum corporate income tax rate were carried out, I feel that at least I observed that a lot of low-income and middle-income countries were upset about how the negotiation process happened and it is true that this was a negotiation process that was under the ages of the OECD giving a lot of power in these negotiations to rich countries, to rich nations. And so when we're discussing about maybe augmenting this process or reopening it to go further, I feel it's very important to think about the right setup and to me the ideal setup here is the United Nations. It's not a club of rich countries that are benevolent enough to incorporate other countries. No, it should be, you know, every country has an equal voice here and I welcome the proposal by, you know, the global south led by Brazil in the G20 but we really need to hear to incorporate all countries in a framework like under the UN tax convention that has been pushing these subjects over the past years and that have actually come up with proposals that are more favorable to low and middle-income countries than what was actually adopted at the OECD. Maybe a final point of this. So to me there are things that have worked over the past few years in terms of tax negotiations, things that have started but are still very limited in what they were able to actually achieve and topics that actually are entirely missing from the agenda. Things that work is automatic exchange of banking information. That is something that is very positive and it worked. What has started to be discussed is global minimum corporate taxation but 15% as I said is too low and there are so many loopholes that corporations continue to pay very low tax rates, 5%, 10% lower than 15%. And something that hasn't been addressed at all is the taxation of centimillionaires or billionaires and so far we do not have a framework to discuss that and to make progress on this and this is where I would like to see a lot of progress in the coming month and years. That's great. In just a moment I'm going to open it up to questions so if you have any start getting them ready. But let me ask a question now to Allison and to Amitabh. We've just talked about some of the more innovative ideas to address this. Can you share with us any ideas that you've come across in your research that you think are innovative that can address the challenges that we're talking about? Well, I mean I think what we want to do, I mean we do really need to rethink a lot of global tax. I mean really just because we have a more an economy more based on intangibles we have a lot more globalization. So really I mean it depends on the country. I focus more on the U.S. and I mean my preferred way of taxing the U.S. isn't exactly innovative. I think we should move more towards consumption taxes and away from corporate taxes. You know obviously we need corporate taxes but the problem with corporate taxes and using those as your main means of raising tax revenue is often the person who ends up paying for them that burden is borne by the workers. And if you want to be equitable, I mean that is often not the people we want to target which is why the way I was always taught public finance is it's better to sort of tax consumption, particularly high-end consumption. That way you can be more targeted and get the wealthy because as much as we would like to get more revenue from the super wealthy and they certainly can afford to pay a lot more it's very challenging to tax their wealth because wealth is very hard to measure. A lot of their assets are in private entities that are really impossible to value. So I think we should be thinking a lot more about say VAT taxes and a lot of aspects of technology is making that a lot easier because you can sort of see at all different chains of the sort of production process where value is being created. We're kind of instituting those VATs a lot easier because we might want higher than a 15% tax on corporations but politically it's a very hard thing when you have a lot of countries that have sort of built their economies around being a low tax state so getting them to agree to it. As I said, the U.S. is already sort of very reluctant to pass this first pillar just because it would largely hit their big tech firms and sort of they see that as debatable but some politicians definitely see that as undermining their tax revenue in their base so that's what makes sort of even something as simple as that which isn't even the 15% minimum tax just a relatively easier part already very hard to pass so we have to be realistic about what's possible think very carefully about tax incidents and who that fits and what's politically feasible. Amitabh, do you agree on consumption tax? I was just coming back to your question I would say that why do we run after innovation when the fundamentals are broken? I think it's really critical we know progressive taxation works and that's something that we are running away from. In the last one decade corporate taxes have come down 10% income taxes have gone up by 20% consumption taxes have gone up by 10% what are we trying to do? We're ending up actually taxing the workers and common citizens whereas on the other hand the super rich continue to go scot-free so it's just going back to the fundamentals of progressive taxation and that's something that we certainly need to do and on the question of the corporate taxes as in the enormity of the power they have as in again I would urge everybody to have a look at our report we're essentially making that point that these corporate monopolies now have so much power that they're able to even change policies and the economic systems and that's extremely worrying for any democratic society. Yes I see you have something you want to say Lucas go ahead. Very quick response to the argument that it's actually too complicated to tax wealth though we should tax consumption. I didn't say complicated. Difficult, complicated, hard to measure. Well there are a lot of businesses in this world that actually they're daily businesses about estimating the value of other businesses so if we're not able to measure the wealth of businesses and of individuals in this data intensive world there is some kind of an issue and the other argument here is you know in 1913 and 14 when income progressive taxation was invented the very argument of those who were against that was to say we do not have the data we don't know how much people earn and that was correct at the time governments didn't have this statistical toolkit to know how much people were earning they created this statistical apparatus to implement these taxes so to me this is really the kind of leap that we need and that we can do today because if we start to tax consumption as was just said before this is really the very things that from my perspective contributes to undermine trust because taxes on consumption we know are very often in fact in so many cases very regressive that is they fall much more on those who have the least resources and the very wealthy are able to you know have a very small tax burden when we have a tax system that relies essentially on consumption taxes Minister do you want to get in on this conversation about consumption taxes? Well I do understand this debate especially from countries where there were a lot of people who are wealthy and of course many other people who are consumers but when you have got few of those because if you look at the case of Zambia the number of corporate bodies that are really viable and contributing positively there are very few so the end result is that people who are in formal employment and therefore are unable to pay taxes and also people who are in the formal business themselves and who get captured in tax net there are very few so our challenge is to increase the number of corporates or companies whether they are big whether they are small our challenge is to increase the number of investment more companies, more individuals in employment if we are just going to insist on say the few that are there the few business that are there tax them and think that we are now going to create more money for the state you are shooting yourself in the foot if you are going to say the few of you who are in employment, formal sector employment we tax you more and more and we think that we are going to add value to the economy you'll be shooting yourself in the foot so I think for us our challenge is how can we raise the level of economic participation by entities that are economically viable and we can only do so by avoiding the risks of over taxation I'm not saying no tax everyone must pay their taxes but the temptation in the third world is to believe that if you tax higher than what other people are taxing then you are making progress you are not making progress you are delaying progress Do we have questions here? Yes? I think someone's going to bring you a microphone Thank you I'm Sanma Melisa Moghamedi I'm from Global Shapers Morelia which is in Mexico I have a lot of questions but I will ask just one I'm starting my master in international taxes so for me it's very important to share these and ask for me it's not about well taxes I think that's a solution to a problem that has been going on to a couple of years ago but it's not a future thing that should happen because for me it's more about the income taxes hasn't been able to achieve the present that they need to contribute for companies because there is a lot of loop holds in the taxes or our law institutions and we also are not talking about the informal economies that we have in all of our countries of course everyone should pay taxes but not everyone is paying them and also the ones that are paying it it's just that it's up for them the rate but not for the ones that are not paying taxes so for me the question will be how can we make or some strategies for the informal economies to actually pay taxes instead of just looking for the ones that are paying and up the rates for them that will be my question Informal economy, who wants to tackle that one? I could say a few things I don't know that much about it but it does seem that there's just the more sort of digitization of money is really opening up a lot of new doors for that and as I said is more people like are paid electronically then that's information because I mean right now if you're being paid cash there's really no way to know in the informal economy who's getting paid what so I think that I mean it's slow I mean this is also sort of often a population that is still using cash more but certainly it's also a population that's using a lot of transactions also on phones more so I think I mean there's been some case studies in the African continent about different ways you can start collecting tax revenue from that population you know obviously at an appropriate rate Maybe I can just add on that from what we've seen in our country in Zambia you're right there's a lot of tax avoidance from actors in the informal sector so one of the things that we've had for some time is to create a threshold that if you are small and medium especially the very small one micro because those are the ones that tend to avoid taxes a lot at that level we have attempted to put a threshold and say if your revenue per year is so much we will not go after you with formal books and accountants and so forth we just agree that X percent of your revenues you must pay in taxes but I think she also mentioned I think the era of digitization is creating new opportunities of how we can make people to contribute and one of the things that we did in their budget pronouncement for this year 2024 is that money transfers via mobile funds because that is now a lot of transactions are taking place in Africa not via banks but via mobile phone transfers and to the extent that a number of the informal sector business players transact a lot on the mobile phones we will impose a small tax on the transfers themselves of course we are also mindful of the fact that we should not cue this initiative it's good that people who are in the informal sector have now been included in the financial sector via mobile phones so we don't want to come with a big hammer to kill that prematurely but at the same time we believe that these transactions reflect a certain degree of ability to pay and therefore we will impose taxes there's much more to be learned and as this digitization comes on stream and progresses I'm sure I will learn more lessons on what else we can do to make them contribute Amitabh, do you have something that you want to say on this topic? Yeah, so I know we are running out of time so I'll just make three telegraphic points the first I think we need to also get into the fundamental question of why do we have the informal sector and what does the informal sector essentially means at least in India it essentially means no job security no social security and therefore again the argument of we need much greater progressive taxation to ensure that the state is able to deliver the fundamental task of ensuring dignity of work for everyone so I think that would really be the fundamental point second hasn't just because I get completely foxed by this argument that because there's poor tax compliance let's do away with taxes a leaking bucket let's not collect water we need to ensure compliance and that's really the critical piece and the third digital with technology businesses are changing dramatically capital is able to move across borders so comfortably and people at the moment just cannot so many of people will not even get visas to come to this place so there are those fundamental questions that we need to address particularly on the informal sectors and I feel very strongly if you work with the informal sector in India they're just surviving whereas there's still a very large class of people who are thriving with excessive opulence well I think that this has been a really dynamic conversation with many different perspectives shared let me try to summarize what I've heard in this conversation we know that the theme of this overall with is around rebuilding trust and it was pointed out in the early part of this conversation that that certainly applies to tax policy and that's a big part of what we're talking about here today is trust, trust within nations, trust globally climate change is requiring an increased need for public resources and so this is one of the very important things that's driving the need to think about tax policy we went on to talk about the fact that small businesses seem to pay more in taxes than corporates and we had many examples of that and the minister helped us also to appreciate that within his country that is certainly a challenge for the small businesses we then went on to talk about how different countries need to be aligned globally and within a region and if you don't do so then from the perspective of any one nation you might lose out to economic development that goes across borders we went on to talk also about the fact that the global south needs to have its voice in the tax policy and that many of the international policies that we've discussed that have been on the table have been driven by the global north and so then we had an interesting conversation about consumption tax versus income tax we have different opinions which always makes for a lively conversation and I think that at the end of the day we had some closing remarks that looked a lot at the fact that why are we looking for innovation because there is a view that progressive taxing works and it's just a question of enforcing that we also heard from the minister that in his country he's looking to use technology in order to do a better job in complying with the existing tax structures and that compliance will help achieve some of these goals so thank you all very much for your contributions to this conversation and thank you for being a good audience