Fiscal Reform for a Strong Tunisia: Short Term Technical Assistance Consultant’s Report

The registry is responsible for maintaining accurate and up-to-date information on taxpayers, including their tax identification numbers, addresses, and other relevant details. However, the registry has been plagued by issues related to duplicate and inactive taxpayers, which can lead to errors in tax calculations and compliance. The DGI is responsible for the registration of taxpayers and the issuance of Tax Identification Numbers (TINs), known as the "Matricule Fiscal." The agency is also responsible for opening tax accounts for taxpayers, processing taxpayer returns, assessing, inspecting, and auditing taxpayers, reviewing taxpayer objections, and following up with non-filers. However, the DGI is not responsible for receiving tax payments or collecting taxpayer debt, which falls under the responsibility of the Direction Générale de la Comptabilité Publique et du Recouvrement (DGCPR). The DGI is organized into several subunits, including the Direction des Grandes Entreprises (DGE), which is responsible for large taxpayers, and the Direction des Moyennes Entreprises (DME), which is responsible for taxpayers with annual turnovers between 5,000,000 and 20,000,000 Tunisian Dinars (DT). The Centre Régional de Contrôle des Impôts (CRCI) is responsible for a geographic area corresponding to an administrative governorate and oversees several Bureaux de Contrôle (BCIs), which are local tax offices responsible for administering taxes locally. The IT section of the DGI is responsible for providing application and general IT support to the agency, including on RAFIC, the main tax administration system operated by the DGI. However, the IT section does not host applications, which are instead hosted by the Centre Informatique du Ministère des Finances (CIMF). Internal Audit is responsible for maintaining and overseeing administrative procedures at the DGI, drafting and maintaining operating procedure manuals, and overseeing the ISO certification of BCIs. The DGCPR is responsible for the registration of legal documents, the reception of tax payments, and the collection and management of tax arrears. The internal organization of the DGCPR mirrors that of the DGI, with taxpayers paying taxes at the DGCPR they are assigned to. The Central Register of Commerce (CRC) is a section of the Institut National de la Normalisation et de la Propriété Industrielle (INNORPI) and is tasked with maintaining the centralized information system that houses information on legal entities and commercial enterprises in Tunisia. The register is public, and information on all legal entities and commercial enterprises is accessible by the public via the website. Several government entities, through their processes, are directly or indirectly linked to taxpayer registry information. Understanding the structure of the different entities and their relationship to each other, particularly as it relates to taxpayer registry information, is crucial to addressing the issues related to the taxpayer registry. The consultant's analysis of the taxpayer registry data for data integrity issues lies outside the scope of the current consultancy, as it requires specialized software that was unavailable during the consultancy.