Tax & Accounting Blog

Today’s blog is a guest post from my colleague Karen Heck, a fellow Legal Analyst specializing in Brazil and Latin America for Thomson Reuters Indirect Tax Research. In the same day Congress approved alterations to the 2016 Fiscal Budget, the lower house’s speaker Eduardo Cunha accepted a motion to open impeachment proceedings against President Dilma … Read More

Soon the winter session of Parliament begins in India. This marks another opportunity for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to break the current GST deadlock. To break the deadlock, the BJP will need to convince the Upper House of Parliament to pass the Constitution Amendment Bill. The Constitution … Read More

Fiji’s Minister of Finance, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, presented his 2016 Budget announcement on November 6, 2015. The announcement has a value-added tax proposal that is noteworthy in two respects; the amount and the rationale. The Minister has proposed reducing Fiji’s single VAT rate from 15% to 9%. This would place Fiji’s VAT rate below Australia’s … Read More

Japan’s 2017 Consumption Tax increase from 8% to 10% will most likely add a reduced rate. A reduced rate in most countries is a normal event but in Japan it will require a fundamental change to how the Consumption Tax is recorded and documented. Reduced rates are common around the world, the European Union allows … Read More

Pakistan recently announced that it is considering moving from its current value added tax (VAT) to a single-stage sales tax. This feels like it would be a step backward instead of forward—like someone walking into an Apple store and asking to downgrade his brand new IPhone to an older model. In the world of sales … Read More

Imagine you go to the store and buy something and you are entered into a drawing for cash or a gift card. In Slovakia, receipts from stores and other merchants can be entered with the government for prizes. There is an app for  your mobile phone which lets you register the receipt. In fact, in … Read More