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When we think about "direct" taxation we usually have in mind transactions
that are primarily designed to report, or even to arrange payment of, taxes
rendered from some sort of legal entity to a tax jurisdiction in
fulfillment
of some legal requirement. Typically, in the paper world, we have some sort
of
tax form, specifically designed to convey identification information,
tax compliance information and perhaps actual financial information,
sometimes
accompanied by payment information (a cheque, credit card details or even
pieces of paper issued by a central bank that "promise to pay the bearer on
demand...." - ie money).

When you think about this kind of transaction in a logical way, it really
boils down to a "container" document defined by the tax authority which
carries
a number of well-defined components, some of which have nothing
intrinsically
to do with tax (names, addresses, time periods, financial calculations,
payments, etc) but which are the subject of other standards initiatives
(e.g.
the OASIS extensible Name and Address Languages - xNAL, or XBRL), and some
of which are specific to a tax jurisdiction and/or a particular type of
tax.

Now examine the transactions that involve "indirect" taxation. These are
usually business documents of one form or another (invoices, receipts,
etc),
the primary purpose of which is not to report or collect indirect tax. Tax
authorities have no direct influence over the design and construction of
these documents, save perhaps for the legal requirements to show the tax
information in certain ways. The tax component of these documents is just
one of a number of components that you'd typically find embedded therein
(names, addresses, time periods, product descriptions, payments etc -
spotted a pattern yet? :-).

On the one hand, taxation is the primary purpose of direct tax
"transactions",
and a number of subsidiary "common" components are required to compose the
"ensemble". On the other hand, indirect tax is a subsidiary "common"
component
in the "ensemble" required to compose a business "transaction".

When you look at these two aspects together, it becomes pretty clear that
in all cases there are container "documents" comprising re-usable "common"
components. In the direct tax case, we (as a tax standards body) are likely
to have jurisdiction over the document types, or "templates", and the tax-
specific components (which may or may not be re-usable). In the indirect
tax
case, we may have jurisdiction over the tax-specific components ceded to us
by the bodies responsible for various types of business documents. In both
cases we will need to adopt or work with standards already defined for
non-tax-specific components or document templates.

If we take a coherent view of the problem and tackle both aspects within
the same fundamental framework then we not only avoid duplication of
effort,
but we also fit right in as a logical extension to existing and emerging
business standards.

It will probably not have escaped your attention that I'm referring in a
rather thinly veiled way to UBL/ebXML and their framework of document
templates and re-usable components (called Core Components in ebXML and
defined there as abstract entities, and called Business Information
Entities,
BIEs, in UBL where the abstract entities are made flesh in the guise of
XML Schemas). An awful lot of work has already gone into UBL, which is
underpinned by ebXML, and it is beginning to look like the only game in
town (unless we want to re-invent a whole bunch of wheels).

Perhaps, once the technical sub-committee is constituted, it will be time
to
put up a "strawman" proposal for our work, based on the UBL framework. Then
the technical SC can get to grips with the technical complexities of UBL
and ebXML whilst the business SC defines requirements that will eventually
be satisfied by tax-specific UBL document templates and tax-specific BIEs
cranked out by the techies.

        Andy
--


Andy Greener                         Mob: +44 7836 331933
GID Ltd, Reading, UK                 Tel: +44 118 956 1248
andy@gid.co.uk                       Fax: +44 118 958 9005








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