(ii) Taxes and transfers
In practice in most cases taxes are recorded at the time of the cash receipt, or at most
on a “time-adjusted cash receipt” basis, whereby cash receipts are lagged by some fixed
amount of time (one or two months) to approximate the time of payment or accrual.19
Similarly, transfers are usually recorded at the time of payment.
Fortunately, for most types of revenues and transfers the difference between accrual
and cash figures is unimportant. It becomes relevant only when there are collection
lags, as it is the case with income taxes on corporations and income taxes paid by the
self-employed in some countries. When this occurs, the contemporaneous elasticity of
the cash measure of the revenue to its base is 0; the contemporaneous elasticity of the
accrual measure, instead, is the statutory one. The construction of the net tax elasticities,
described in Appendix B, takes these collection lags into account.