13/07/2015
The European Cooperation Programme for Social Cohesion in Latin America, EUROsociAL, has promoted the creation of a Tax Education Network comprised of tax and education institutions of the European Union and Latin America.
Taller Internacional de Educación Fiscal en México. Octubre 2014.International Tax Education Workshop in Mexico, October 2014.
With the aim of creating a new tax culture where citizens see their role as taxpayers to be an essential one, EUROsociAL II, the cooperation programme for social cohesion in Latin America financed by the European Union and managed by FIIAPP, has promoted the creation of a Tax Education Network (known by its Spanish acronym REF) comprised of tax and educational institutions of the European Union and Latin America. Among other institutions, the tax authorities of Bulgaria, Austria, Finland, Italy, Spain, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, Uruguay, Ecuador and Guatemala have now joined the network.
Tax authorities in Latin America and the European Union are increasingly aware of the fact that there are other ways of ensuring taxpayers comply with their tax obligations, rather than simply advising them of the risk of sanctions, such as improving customer services to taxpayers and tax education strategies aimed at making citizens internalise voluntary tax compliance as a personal conviction.
Designed as a specialist, flexible and participative space for learning among tax and educational institutions of the European Union and Latin America, the REF seeks to strengthen public policies on tax education.
In order to draft the statutes of the network, a working group was formed, made up of the tax authorities of Brazil, Mexico, Bulgaria, Honduras and Chile, with Spain’s FIIAPP acting as interim secretariat. The REF’s governing bodies include the Assembly, the Permanent Secretariat and the Executive Committee. Each institution has a focal point.
The REF network has a governance model and also a web portal: educacionfiscal.org. Within the framework of EUROsociAL, a web portal has been created to support the work of the network, as well as a specific sub-portal for exchanging experiences on Accounting and Tax Support Centres (NAF Network).
The portal provides various difference services that facilitate the exchange of experiences and systematise and disseminate existing knowledge in the field: a blog section, virtual library, innovative experiences, news, a YouTube channel and a Twitter account (@culturafiscal), among others. The site also includes a work area covering each of the different working groups: formal education, non-formal education, higher education, accounting and tax support centres, communication strategies and tax education measurement strategies.
