PwC: Canada makes paying taxes look easy

By Rob Starr, Content Manager, Big4.com

This year Canada places 8th overall when it comes to its ease of paying taxes for businesses, according to Paying Taxes 2013 – a joint study from PwC, the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) that looks at tax regimes in 185 economies around the world. Paying Taxes 2013 measures the overall ease of paying taxes for a hypothetical small to medium-sized domestic business by assessing three indicators: number of tax payments per year; time taken to compile returns and submit tax payments; and by calculating companies’ total tax liability as a percentage of pre-tax profits.

Some of the other global key findings from the report include:

• The highest number of payments is now made in Africa (37) and the lowest in North America (8.3)
• Economies in the Central Asia and Eastern European region have shown the largest fall in both the time to comply (200 hours) and number of payments (22.2).
• The Asia-Pacific economies tend to have TTRs below the world average and they have continued to fall as they look to compete in the world economy.
• Firms in the United Arab Emirates face the lightest administrative burn in paying taxes. They must only make four payments a year and spend 12 hours doing so.

According to the Paying Taxes 2013 report, more economies have focused on introducing electronic systems in the last two years. Central Asia and Eastern Europe has been the biggest reformer over the eight years of the study and the introduction of electronic filing and reducing tax rates have been key to the reform process in these regions