Research

Tax Administration 2025 (OECD, Box 4.4)

What the report says

Tax Administration 2025 is the OECD's comparative reference on how tax administrations across advanced and emerging economies are set up and how they are changing. It draws on survey data from more than fifty jurisdictions to compare performance, digital maturity, resourcing, and innovation, and it uses short boxes throughout to highlight specific national examples.

Box 4.4, titled "Netherlands – Tax-splitter on Value Added Tax" and set on pages 52 to 53, is one of those examples. It describes the Netherlands Tax Administration working on a tax splitter in which the VAT portion of a payment goes directly to the tax administration while the remainder goes to the entrepreneur. The mechanism records verifiable proof within each transaction, which gives the tax administration a reliable audit trail while the entrepreneur keeps sovereignty over their own data. The box attributes the example to the Netherlands and links out to the joint government.nl report that documents the design in full.

Two things are worth being precise about. The box names the Netherlands Tax Administration and does not name mintBlue, so what the OECD documents is the model, not a company. And it is a short illustrative case within a comparative chapter rather than an extended case study, so it is best read as the OECD noting an example worth watching.

Why it matters for real-time taxation

Inclusion in this series is an authority-side signal. Tax Administration 2025 is the reference that tax administrations read to see what their peers are doing, and a real-time VAT split appearing in it means the idea has moved from a national experiment into the OECD's shared frame of reference. For anyone assessing whether real-time taxation is a serious line of work rather than a vendor pitch, this is among the most credible external markers available.

It matters for a second reason too. The box captures the exact design principle this site is built on: assurance that travels inside the transaction, a split that routes the tax portion straight to the administration, and a taxpayer who keeps control of their data. That is real-time taxation described in a tax administration's own vocabulary, in the OECD's own publication.

Who wrote it

The report was produced by the OECD's Centre for Tax Policy and Administration together with the Forum on Tax Administration, and issued by OECD Publishing in Paris.

Citation

• Title: Tax Administration 2025: Comparative Information on OECD and other Advanced and Emerging Economies (Box 4.4, "Netherlands – Tax-splitter on Value Added Tax", pp. 52–53)
• Publisher: OECD, Centre for Tax Policy and Administration / Forum on Tax Administration (OECD Publishing, Paris)
• Year: 2025
• Link: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/tax-administration-2025_cc015ce8-en.html (DOI 10.1787/cc015ce8-en)

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