Taxing Problems
Submitted by prachatai on Fri, 27/08/2010 - 12:52
Harrison George
This week’s prize for twisted logic goes to Nipon Poapongsakorn, President of the Thailand Development Research Institute think-tank and member of the Prawase Reform Committee. The committee, tasked with reducing injustice and inequity in the wake of the red shirt protests, is looking at the tax system.
And that is a jolly good place to look.
Those who have been around for a while may fondly recall the list of top taxpayers that the Revenue Department used to publish every year. It was intended as a way of publicly recognizing those people who had contributed most, in financial terms, to the welfare of society.
But it provoked some embarrassing questions. Was Thai commerce so dominated by foreigners that they invariably took the majority of top slots? And many people found it easy to name Thais who were generally considered to be doing well for themselves, but whose names were conspicuous by their absence.
It just got too embarrassing. It stopped being a way of acknowledging duty nobly done by those whose names were listed and more a celebration of successful tax avoidance (and possibly evasion) by those whose names were missing. The Revenue Department quietly dropped the whole idea and the tax payments of the elite sank back into the obscurity they so devoutly cherish.
The recent travails of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra have kept the public aware that his infamous 73 billion baht sale of Shin Corp shares to Temasek was carefully structured so as to be tax-free (though the Revenue Department now argues that they weren’t careful enough and has sent in a tax demand). What is perhaps not so well known is that all profits from the sale of shares on the Stock Exchange of Thailand are tax-free.
And a few years ago a talk was given in Bangkok by a Japanese tax expert who had come to Thailand to compare inheritance taxes in the two countries and discovered to his confusion that this would be rather difficult. Thailand had no inheritance tax. And still doesn’t.
Yes, the current tax system in the country looks very much like a leading contributor to income and wealth inequality.
At this point I have to get a bit technical. Taxes are often divided into ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’. Progressive taxes are like income tax. The more you earn, the higher percentage of your income you are supposed to pay in tax. In this way the rich pay more and the poor pay less (or even nothing); the net difference in income between rich and poor is evened out a bit. Regressive taxes do the opposite. They fall proportionately heavier on those with least ability to pay and exacerbate inequalities of wealth and income.
And just a bit more technical stuff. Direct taxes are those that can be adjusted for different groups of taxpayers. So income tax rules normally include provisions so that people raising children pay less. Indirect taxes are indiscriminate and hit everyone more or less the same.
Now you may have spotted that whereas it is relatively easy to make direct taxes progressive (since you can single out the rich and make them pay more), it is much more difficult to do the same with indirect taxes.
And if you keep thinking, you can now see that Value Added Tax, applied to almost all transactions, pretty much fills the bill as an indirect tax, and is therefore unlikely to be a progressive tax, and consequently won’t do much to reduce inequalities of wealth and income.
In practice, VAT is tweaked to exempt certain transactions in line with government economic policy. Normally, the sale of essential or socially worthy goods is exempt; so there’s no VAT on fresh food or schoolbooks. And the government can also exempt areas of the economy that it wants to promote, so exporters in Thailand can claim back any VAT they have paid on stuff they export, though they will forever complain about the time and bureaucratic rigmarole involved.
But these measures barely change VAT’s regressive nature. The exemptions apply to everyone who buys a kilo of rice, rich or poor.
No let’s get back to Mr Nopin and his idea for reducing social inequalities by instituting – and financing – a social welfare system:
‘Social welfare involves most people in the country, and so does VAT. So they should be considered together, on the premise that if you want more social welfare from the state, you have to pay more tax. VAT should, therefore, be increased to 10% from the current rate of 7%.’
So in order to fund an equalizing project like social security, we should use a dis-equalizing tax like VAT.
And why? Because of a logic that says if we want a benefit, the direct beneficiaries should pay for it. So if you want better hospitals, then tax the patients; if you want well-resourced schools, then tax schoolchildren; if you want better animal protection, then tax the animals; if you want a better environment, then tax the trees.
Is there no scope in Thailand for raising tax revenues in other ways that would reduce injustice and equity? Like taxing the profits from share-trading? Or an inheritance tax?
Let’s hope that the Reform Committee’s other proposals are a bit more, well, reformist.