© Institute for Digitalization in Tax Law
Chair: Dr. Christoph Schmidt, University of Public Administration and Finance, Ludwigsburg
Vice Chairman: Andreas Kowallik (Deloitte)
Mission: This Expert committee is responsible for developing a method that can be applied to all types of taxes and that makes it possible to digitally map existing and new tax legal norms to the greatest extent possible. The aim is always to include both the legal and the technical level and to answer the question of whether the ubiquitous increase in the use of EDP should be accompanied by an adaptation of substantive law or whether, beyond this, tax law should be geared to digitalization so that the regulations are in line with the requirements for automated tax enforcement.
As a long-term goal, the committee is pursuing the development of a comprehensive toolbox for the digitization of tax legislation that legislators can draw on. Ideally, this will include both generally applicable tools, i.e. for all types of tax, and tools specific to each type of tax. In order to fulfill the mission objectives, an initial start was made with the creation of an audit, the “IDSt Digital Audit”, for testing and evaluating the digitizability of tax law norms. In the medium term, this audit and the method still to be developed are to be incorporated into the regulatory framework for quality assurance of tax legislative processes.
The digitizability of tax law norms is accompanied by the latent danger of misdirecting the law to the programmer instead of the taxpayer. In order to counter this risk, legal scholars and computer scientists in particular should cooperate closely and in a spirit of trust as early as the legislative process. Following this idea, interdisciplinary cooperation within the framework of the committee’s work represents the central maxim for action of the I. Expert Committee. In addition, a close exchange with the standard setters as well as with recognized and established independent advisory bodies, such as the Normenkontrollrat, lends itself to this.
Focal points: In order to be able to be sufficiently precise in the concrete research work, the focus is set in such a way that aspects concerning the digital implementation of tax law norms, both with regard to the legislative process and to any necessary repercussions on the contents of the law and its style, are of overriding importance. Priority will be given to tax norms related to corporate accounting.
In order to be able to be sufficiently precise in the concrete research work, the focus is set in such a way that aspects which concern the digital implementation of tax law norms, both with regard to the legislative process and to any necessary repercussions on the contents of the law and its style, are of overriding importance. The principles to be developed concern all types of taxes, but can have a particularly beneficial effect in the case of transactional taxes such as sales tax, energy taxes, other excise taxes, and likewise in the case of payroll tax and withholding taxes. Existing theoretical work on this topic (or work in progress) should be evaluated and enriched with empirical values from practice as well as from other disciplines. The same applies to modern technologies such as business intelligence, artificial intelligence, process mining, decision model and notation, or blockchain, all of which can serve as technical tools and/or benchmarks for the desired digitalizability of tax standards.
