Emerging economies collect substantially less tax revenue relative to national income than advanced economies, and a large share of this shortfall reflects weak enforcement capacity rather than statutory rates. Digital audio technologies and integrated financial information systems are increasingly promoted as instruments for narrowing this gap, yet the evidence on whether, when, and how they raise compliance and transparency remains scattered across public economics, accounting, and information systems scholarship. This review synthesises empirical and conceptual work published between 2006 and 2026 to assess what is known about four interlocking mechanisms: third party information reporting and electronic invoicing, electronic filing and payment platforms, continuous auditing and analytics, and distributed ledger and regulatory technology approaches to data governance. Three consistent patterns emerge. First, technologies that create verifiable third-party information trails produce the most durable compliance gains, with value added tax self-enforcement, electronic sales registers, and consumer incentive schemes generating measurable revenue increases, while technologies that merely digitise existing processes without new information yield smaller and more fragile effects. Second, the revenue and transparency return to digital systems are conditional on administrative capacity, data quality, and political commitment rather than automatic, which explains why similar tools succeed in some jurisdictions and fail in others. Third, the accounting profession is moving from periodic sampling toward continuous assurance and population level analytics, but adoption in emerging economies lags because of skills, infrastructure, and governance constraints. These findings suggest that the design and sequencing of digital reforms matter more than the sophistication of the technology itself. The review offers tax administrators and policymakers evidence graded account of which interventions rest on strong causal evidence and which rest on weaker conceptual or cross sectional foundations, and it identifies the conditions under which digital instruments translate into sustained fiscal gains rather than symbolic modernization.
Current anti-corruption measurement tools are unable to accurately assess local corruption realities because they are disconnected from, and driven by, experts who are far removed from the contexts in which they must be used. In this chapter, we argue that, due to the variable definition of corruption, those best positioned to monitor it are the citizens impacted by it. We examine how and why citizens can be incentivised to participate in monitoring efforts, while also looking ahead to novel methods, such as blockchain and crowdsourcing, to create pathways for reporting, participation, and accountability. We highlight that, with robust protections for citizens and capacity building, citizen-led anti-corruption measurement can be a sustainable method for building transparency and trust.
Aleksandar Stojkov, A. Maksimovska Stojkova, Elena Neshovska Kjoseva, Jovan Zafiroski
This study investigates how a territorially uneven distribution of informal economic activity affects subnational fiscal capacity and potentially distorts fiscal equalization systems. Using a Multiple Indicators, Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model, we estimate the size of the informal economy across the eight statistical regions of North Macedonia over the 2008–2023 period. The estimated shares of regional informality are subsequently linked to indicators of fiscal dependence and local revenue performance. The findings suggest that regions characterized by larger informal economies tend to exhibit greater dependence on intergovernmental transfers and weaker effective fiscal autonomy. The analysis further indicates that intergovernmental transfer systems relying primarily on regional gross domestic product and realized tax collections may systematically underestimate the true economic potential of highly informal jurisdictions. The paper contributes to the literature by conceptualizing informality not merely as an informal economic activity, but as a structural distortion affecting the measurement of fiscal capacity and the functioning of decentralized public finance systems.
Throughout the 2010s, blockchain was widely embraced for improving data storage efficiency and transparency. However, it later hit a trough of disillusionment, criticized for overhyping its benefits and setting unrealistic expectations. Grounded in qualitative research design and methods, this research explores technology affordances and constraints of blockchain for curbing public sector corruption, especially in countries plagued by systemic corruption, using Thailand as a primary context. The findings indicate that blockchain’s Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) effectively mitigates the principal–agent problem by enhancing both vertical and horizontal transparency. However, the adoption of blockchain is hindered by several constraints, including potential misuse, cost-efficiency, regulatory governance, security and confidentiality, and digital skills and organizational culture. Therefore, introducing blockchain into government operations must not occur in isolation; it requires a holistic integration of sociopolitical and economic factors to ensure that it serves as a viable anticorruption tool.
Italy introduced a dedicated crypto-asset tax regime in 2023 that is broadly modelled on its longstanding financial income tax system. The regime primarily governs the taxation of capital gains and other income from crypto-assets for individuals, thereby offering initial legal certainty for users and service providers. However, it establishes a single set of rules for all crypto-assets regardless of their functions or underlying rights and leaves several stages of the crypto-asset lifecycle and many asset-specific tax issues insufficiently addressed. This article analyses the regime’s core design features through the lenses of efficiency and equity and assesses the framework’s ‘future-proof’ capacity in light of rapid technological change with specific attention focused on decentralized finance (DeFi), asset-tokenization, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Finally, it examines enforcement challenges and shows how reliance on the traditional ‘third party tax agent’ model struggles to accommodate the anonymity (or pseudo-anonymity), decentralization, transaction-composability, and a-territoriality of crypto-assets. Against this background, the article identifies potential policy adjustments and alternative compliance mechanisms to enhance the effectiveness and resilience of the Italian framework.
The United States is facing a persistent and rising "tax gap," the discrepancy between taxes owed and taxes paid, that is a systemic failure of traditional retroactive audit procedures.As the complexity of digital financial transactions continues to expand, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) faces serious hurdles from aging infrastructure in providing revenue assurance.In this research, we present a new technical framework, namely the "Smart-Tax Ledger", combining a permissioned blockchain (Hyperledger Fabric) and Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) for the real-time tax compliance.This architecture facilitates the automation of tax withholding and remittance at the point of transaction, leveraging triple-entry accounting principles and smart contracts.Also, the use of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) safeguards the integrity of the distributed ledger and preserves taxpayer privacy.This work presents a complete architectural design, mathematical modeling of fraud detection algorithms, and a debate on the policy implications of the adoption of a "compliance-by-design" paradigm.The system, which is supposed to reduce administrative cost, limit human mistake and fill the national revenue deficit by technical intervention.
Execution Tickets (ET) have emerged as a leading proposal for mitigating MEV-related centralization risks by internalizing MEV through a protocol-level lottery system. This paper provides an empirical game-theoretic analysis (EGTA) of the ET mechanism under an infinite-supply design, modeled as a Tullock contest. We evaluate a 2-slot lookahead window as a minimal temporal design that limits multi-slot MEV while preserving support for user pre-confirmations. By introducing a forfeiture parameter, we parameterize a continuum between All-Pay and Winner-Pay regimes. We then map the fairness-revenue frontier, revealing a fundamental design tension: higher contest decisiveness and forfeiture rates can improve protocol revenue, but may reduce allocation fairness by entrenching dominant builders. We identify a quantitative Goldilocks zone that balances MEV-capture efficiency with market diversity.
Putri Anggia, Aisyah Ajeng Putri Riyanto, Muhammad Fathi
The rapid growth of cryptocurrencies is reshaping the global financial landscape, challenging traditional systems of taxation and regulation. This article examines the complex interplay between cryptocurrency anonymity, legal frameworks, and the pursuit of international tax justice. Using normative legal research with a descriptive approach, this article examined the challenges posed by cryptocurrency adoption in taxation policies. The findings revealed that while blockchain technology enhances transparency and decentralisation, the anonymity features of digital assets create risks of tax evasion and illicit financial flows. Addressing these issues requires integrated efforts among international regulatory frameworks, such as the OECD's CARF and FATF's Travel Rule alongside domestic reforms like Indonesia's HPP Law and the EU's DAC8. Inclusive governance that empowers developing countries and the constitutional grounding of tax justice principles are essential to strike a balance between individual privacy and collective fiscal responsibility. This multi-layered approach is critical to ensuring cryptocurrencies serve as instruments of innovation rather than tools for inequality. Future research should focus on empirical assessments of compliance costs, enforcement effectiveness across borders, and the development of privacy-preserving technologies, such as zero-knowledge proofs, to enable proportional and fair regulation globally.
This paper argues that India's Goods and Services Tax Network has already produced, through tax incentive rather than cryptographic consensus, the supply chain properties — traceability, transparency, fraud reduction, and audit trail — that the blockchain literature proposes to deliver through distributed ledger technology. The argument is not that blockchain does not work. It is that the mechanism that produces tamper-resistance is the incentive, not the technology, and India already has that mechanism at national scale. The paper's original theoretical contribution is a two-player simultaneous-move game formalizing the bilateral incentive structure that the VAT self-enforcement literature has assumed in prose but never derived from primitives. The unique Nash equilibrium (F,D) — formal supplier, demanding buyer — is obtained by iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies and sustained by a single precise condition: τv > c_B, the input tax credit exceeds the buyer's cost of sourcing from a registered alternative. No audit is required at the transaction level. The ITC does the work that enforcement cannot. The upstream formalization cascade — empirically documented by Patnaik (2026) as a doubling of effects over five years — follows directly as this equilibrium applied iteratively upstream, tier by tier, without government intervention at each stage. To the author's knowledge, this micro-foundation does not appear elsewhere in the VAT literature. Pomeranz (2015), Kleven et al. (2011), and de Paula and Scheinkman (2010) treat the self-enforcement intuition as motivation or derive aggregate implications; none writes down the strategic form game or states the equilibrium condition in falsifiable form. The empirical case rests on scale. FY2024-25 gross collections of Rs. 22.08 lakh crore (approx. USD 263 billion). April 2025 single-month record of Rs. 2.37 lakh crore (approx. USD 28 billion). 1.51 crore active registered taxpayers. Six phases of e-invoicing threshold reduction from Rs. 500 crore to Rs. 5 crore, directionally toward universal pre-validated coverage. GST 2.0 implemented September 22, 2025. The Production Linked Incentive scheme disbursing billions to Apple's contract manufacturers on the basis of GSTN-verified production data — the sovereign proof that the infrastructure is trusted for the highest-stakes commercial verification the government performs. The implication for Indian FMCG, pharmaceutical, and logistics firms is direct: private blockchain consortia built to solve domestic supply chain transparency problems are solving a solved problem at non-zero cost.
This paper argues that India's Goods and Services Tax Network has already produced, through tax incentive rather than cryptographic consensus, the supply chain properties — traceability, transparency, fraud reduction, and audit trail — that the blockchain literature proposes to deliver through distributed ledger technology. The argument is not that blockchain does not work. It is that the mechanism that produces tamper-resistance is the incentive, not the technology, and India already has that mechanism at national scale. The paper's original theoretical contribution is a two-player simultaneous-move game formalizing the bilateral incentive structure that the VAT self-enforcement literature has assumed in prose but never derived from primitives. The unique Nash equilibrium (F,D) — formal supplier, demanding buyer — is obtained by iterated elimination of weakly dominated strategies and sustained by a single precise condition: τv > c_B, the input tax credit exceeds the buyer's cost of sourcing from a registered alternative. No audit is required at the transaction level. The ITC does the work that enforcement cannot. The upstream formalization cascade — empirically documented by Patnaik (2026) as a doubling of effects over five years — follows directly as this equilibrium applied iteratively upstream, tier by tier, without government intervention at each stage. To the author's knowledge, this micro-foundation does not appear elsewhere in the VAT literature. Pomeranz (2015), Kleven et al. (2011), and de Paula and Scheinkman (2010) treat the self-enforcement intuition as motivation or derive aggregate implications; none writes down the strategic form game or states the equilibrium condition in falsifiable form. The empirical case rests on scale. FY2024-25 gross collections of Rs. 22.08 lakh crore (approx. USD 263 billion). April 2025 single-month record of Rs. 2.37 lakh crore (approx. USD 28 billion). 1.51 crore active registered taxpayers. Six phases of e-invoicing threshold reduction from Rs. 500 crore to Rs. 5 crore, directionally toward universal pre-validated coverage. GST 2.0 implemented September 22, 2025. The Production Linked Incentive scheme disbursing billions to Apple's contract manufacturers on the basis of GSTN-verified production data — the sovereign proof that the infrastructure is trusted for the highest-stakes commercial verification the government performs. The implication for Indian FMCG, pharmaceutical, and logistics firms is direct: private blockchain consortia built to solve domestic supply chain transparency problems are solving a solved problem at non-zero cost.
The primary purpose is to trace the progression of scholarly research on cryptocurrency taxation, uncovering prevailing patterns, influential contributors, yearly scientific output and citations, most relevant sources, thematic analysis and cooccurrence networks from 2010 to 2025. Leveraging a systematic search on Scopus, our final dataset comprises 115 unique documents, with the majority of publications being highly recent (average age of 2.95 years) and exhibiting a robust annual growth rate of 18.65%. The analysis reveals that the field is highly collaborative (average of 2.7 co-authors per paper) and gaining significant scholarly attention, as evidenced by a promising average of 9.548 citations per document. The thematic structure of the literature, mapped through keyword co-occurrence and strategic diagrams, identifies "cryptocurrency," "blockchain," and "bitcoin" as the core, most central themes. The research is highly multidisciplinary, with a strong focus on regulatory, legal, and financial challenges surrounding taxation, anti-money laundering, and the classification of digital assets. While a dominant research source exists, the high dispersion of publications across 85 distinct sources suggests a fragmented but rapidly maturing field.
The enactment of the Nigeria Tax Act (NTA) 2025 represents a significant restructuring of the nation’s fiscal framework, aimed at capturing value within the borderless digital economy. This study provides a legal analysis of the updated "Significant Economic Presence" (SEP) rule under Section 17 of the Act, which shifts the taxable nexus from traditional physical presence (Permanent Establishment) to economic participation. By expanding the SEP framework, the NTA 2025 formalises the "digital shadow" of the workforce, explicitly including remote freelancers, digital consultants, and content creators within the tax net while mandating residency-based taxation on worldwide income. Additionally, the Act classifies profits from digital asset transactions, including cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as taxable income. The analysis also examines the institutional transition from the Federal Inland Revenue Service to the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), emphasising the deployment of automated technologies for real-time reporting and collection. Despite these advancements, persistent challenges remain, including infrastructure deficits, enforcement complexities in peer-to-peer transactions, and the need to align with global standards such as the OECD’s Two-Pillar Solution. Ultimately, the study concludes that although the NTA 2025 modernises the fiscal social contract, its effectiveness in optimising revenue depends on institutional capacity and clear regulatory guidance.
This article examines the utilization of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) as a mechanism to address import customs tax evasion. The research employs a game-theoretic framework to examine the dynamics of tax evasion and assess the impact of blockchain on improving transparency, accountability, and compliance in customs administration. A systematic literature review process, adhering to PRISMA criteria, was utilized to gather and examine pertinent academic articles. The literature study examines critical subjects, such as the mechanisms of import tax evasion, the digital taxation framework, and the use of blockchain technology into tax systems. The study also examines the relevance of game theory in comprehending and addressing non-compliant behaviors among taxpayers. In the practical phase, we conducted a systematic review of a corpus exceeding 100 publications, obtained from three international research databases: Scopus, Taylor & Francis, and IEEE Xplore. Following the application of rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria to guarantee relevance, a concentrated selection of research constituted the foundation for our study. This research underscores the capacity of DLT to transform conventional evasion tactics, reduce corruption, and improve institutional efficacy in customs operations. Insights are contextualized through a worldwide comparison and an examination of the Moroccan customs scene, offering concrete recommendations for utilizing blockchain to modernize customs operations.
This paper provides a theoretical and methodological basis for aligning digital tax control technologies with tax policy principles in Russia and Tajikistan. This study’s value and innovation stem from tax control’s digital shift and linking tech to tax system principles. The object of the study is tax relations and tax administration practices in the digital transformation of public administration in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Tajikistan. The subject of the study is the theoretical and methodological foundations for aligning digital tax control technologies, such as big data, AI, distributed ledgers, the Industrial Internet of Things, and analytical platforms, with the fundamental principles of state tax policy. The research aims to develop the conceptual contours of the theoretical and methodological study and a mechanism for aligning digital tools and tax policy principles, as well as to identify the institutional, legal, axiological, and process conditions that determine the feasibility and limits of integrating digital control tools into the tax systems of Russia and Tajikistan. The study employed abstract and conceptual analysis, a source review and synthesis, theoretical modeling, and generic scientific methods . The author focused on analyzing and assessing digital tools’ compliance with legal, neutral, transparent, predictable, efficient, and fiscally sustainable principles. The work’s finding is a conclusion: there are methodological limitations in the digitalization of tax control. The author presented a conceptual system, highlighted research areas, and called for framework development. This study covers boosting strategic digital tax solutions, tax policies, the digital transformation of tax authorities, and digital tax control systems.
Bitcoin’s sixteenth anniversary in 2025 provides an important juncture to reflect on how tax law has responded to the emergence of crypto assets. Initially hailed as ‘the monetary experiment of our time’, Bitcoin and its successors have challenged fundamental tax concepts and exposed divergences in domestic and international tax systems. This article first revisits the debate on whether crypto assets should be characterized as ‘money’, demonstrating that classification matters only to the extent that tax consequences diverge across regimes. It then examines four unresolved issues that continue to occupy scholars and policymakers: the characterization of mining rewards as entrepreneurial income or windfall gains; the treatment of staking rewards as active or passive income; the tax consequences of blockchain hard forks; and the classification of collateral use of crypto assets in decentralized finance. Each issue reveals tensions between traditional tax analogies and the novel features of blockchain-based activities, highlighting trade-offs between theoretical purity and administrability. While global convergence is unlikely due to foundational differences in tax systems, the analysis underscores the importance of clarity, consistency, and functional approaches to ensure that taxation keeps pace with technological innovation.
Bhutan has quietly emerged as a significant player in the cryptocurrency space. This article presents a comprehensive overview of Bitcoin and digital currency mining in Bhutan, addressing its history, infrastructure, economic impact, geopolitical implications, and current usage at both national and consumer levels. I shall explore how global trends in Bitcoin and digital currencies compare with Bhutan’s unique journey, and how Bhutan’s strategic approach – harnessing renewable energy for crypto mining – has led it to hold a substantial digital asset reserve. The analysis covers major milestones from Bitcoin’s inception to Bhutan’s recent ventures, and provides insight into why Bhutan embarked on this path, what it means for its economy, and how digital currencies are being used on the ground.
Andreas KOLYDAS, Stamatis Kontsas, Stavros Kalogiannidis
The research aims to find out how cryptocurrency aids tax evasion in Greece, the socio-economic factors contributing to the practice, and the efficiency of the Greek taxation legislation in deterring such conduct. A total of 359 questionnaires were completed by respondents who engage in cryptocurrencies in Greece. Cross correlational statistical analysis and multiple regression analysis were used to test the relationship of cryptocurrency usage, anonymity, tax policies and socio-economic factors and their impact on tax evasion. Also, sociodemographic factors such as income levels and education levels greatly affected the ability to engage in tax evasion. The study provides a validation that the frequency of cryptocurrency usage, anonymity, ineffectual tax laws, socio-economic factors have a positive correlation with tax evasion rates and influence tax dodging in Greece. Based on the issues highlighted in this study, the following steps are advised for the improvement of the Greek anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism regime: i) improve the regulation and enforcement measures concerning cryptocurrencies, ii) enhance the transparency of the cryptocurrency transactions, and iii) address the socio-economic circumstances that enable tax evasion.
Abstract Taxation justice and fiscal federalism are foundational pillars for building an inclusive, democratic, and sustainable nation. As countries diversify economically and socially, the role of equitable taxation becomes central to financing public goods, reducing inequality, and strengthening socio-political cohesion. Fiscal federalism, which concerns the distribution of financial powers and resources across central, state, and local governments, further reinforces the principles of subsidiarity, autonomy, and accountability required in a modern democratic state. This research paper analyses how taxation justice and fiscal federalism contribute to nation-building, examines structural gaps in existing fiscal arrangements, and highlights the need for transparent resource allocation, participatory governance, and decentralized fiscal empowerment. Using qualitative secondary data and descriptive analysis, the study demonstrates that taxation systems that are equitable, efficient, and progressive combined with a well-designed fiscal federalism framework help strengthen democratic participation, reduce regional disparities, support sustainable development, and stabilize public finance. The paper concludes by offering policy recommendations to enhance the equity and efficiency of taxation systems, thereby improving fiscal governance and promoting inclusive nation-building.
The emergence of cryptocurrency has radically threatened traditional fiscal institutions, presenting Indian policymakers with an unrivaled challenge in tax administration and revenue generation. This review takes into account the multifaceted complexities of taxation of cryptocurrency in India, addressing regulatory uncertainties, enforcement issues, and the relevance for tax revenue composition. Drawing on policy trends and scholarly literature at the moment, the present paper investigates India's evolving stance on digital assets—from absolute skepticism to cautious engagement—and how this reflects deeper anxieties around innovation and control. The argument draws on strategic management, technology disruption within financial markets, and organizational change management to situate India's policy measures in context. Even as the 2022 budget introduced specific tax provisions for virtual digital assets, significant concerns continue to exist about mechanisms for compliance, global coordination, and long-term viability of prevailing strategies. India's cryptocurrency taxation regime is discovered to be in the early stages, with adaptive strategies required to reconcile revenue and technological innovation.