PAAFA - Armenian Tax Administration Support Project

The Armenian Tax Administration Support Project aims to support the State Revenue Committee to have a better understanding of the informal economy in Armenia through the elaboration of an industry analysis, an estimate of the informal sector and an average taxpayer profile.

To reach its objective, the project has set up two working groups gathering experts from the French Directorate General of Public Finances and from the Armenian State Revenue Committee (SRC). Each working group focuses on an area of operation:

1) Risk analysis and datamining integration

2) Fight against international tax fraud

Developing risk analysis and datamining integration

The Armenian tax administration seeks to improve its decision-making IT application to facilitate tax audit programming. It would like to benefit from expertise and support in the development of this application in terms of risk analysis and datamining.

The activities of this working group centres around two axes:

• The development of the decision-making application: expert users of the SRC will have a set of pre-established and free query tools which will enable them to get statistical calculations, histogram and data analysis.

• The provision of expertise services allowing expert users of the SRC to fully master the application developed and the associated tools (preprogrammed requests in particular) which will eventually be made available to the personnel of the SRC in charge of Tax Control programming.

Fighting against International Tax Fraud

The objective of this working group is to examine issues connected to international tax fraud whether they have to do with natural persons, legal persons, legacy, VAT etc. with the use of offshore companies, offshore accounts, behaviour change…

Thanks to the activities set up, the Armenian tax administration will get a plan to fight against international tax fraud (research guide, risk analysis grids, training at the international tax fraud).

Regulating the gambling sector in Armenia

Currently there are no mechanisms in place to ensure centralized oversight of the gambling sector in Armenia. In this regard, analyzing the sector and ensuring the compliance of tax burden is crucial and is in SRC’s priorities.

In this context, two experts were invited by SRC to analyse the situation in Armenia and make a presentation on the requirements for regulating the field. They emphasized the role of the SRC in issuing licenses for the provision of gambling, supervising the operators, and monitoring the market.

The Agence Française de développement (AFD) and Expertise France were officially requested to assist the SRC in hiring experts who will work on the necessary documentation for licenses and the regulation requirements for supervising and controlling the operators.