Research

Towards Seamless Taxation (OECD, 2022)

What the report says

Towards Seamless Taxation: Supporting SMEs to Get Tax Right sets out a vision in which compliance stops being a separate task that businesses perform after the fact and starts becoming a by-product of the tools they already use. The Forum on Tax Administration frames the small and medium enterprise as the group that carries the heaviest relative compliance burden, and it argues that the way to lighten that burden is to move assurance closer to the point where economic activity actually takes place.

The report grounds this argument in practice rather than theory. Its two worked case studies are Standard Business Reporting in the Netherlands, which standardises the data businesses report to government, and pre-filling in Chile, where the administration prepares returns on the taxpayer's behalf. Both show the same principle from different angles: when the administration can draw on reliable data at source, the taxpayer is asked to check rather than to compile, and errors fall before they ever reach an audit.

Read the report carefully and one thing is clear about what it does not contain. It does not describe a real-time VAT split or the Dutch tax-splitter model. That case is documented separately in the OECD's Tax Administration 2025 (see the related entry below). This 2022 report is the origin of the term and the thematic frame, not the source of the split-payment case.

Why it matters for real-time taxation

Seamless taxation is an authority-side design goal before it is a technology. It says the tax administration should verify what it needs to verify without pulling the taxpayer into a separate reporting cycle, and it should do so at the moment activity happens rather than months later. Real-time taxation is one concrete way to reach that goal: instead of collecting data after the fact and reconstructing what happened, the administration receives assurance built into the transaction itself.

Framed this way, the 2022 report is the policy vocabulary that makes real-time VAT legible to a tax authority. It lets an administration describe an ambition, less friction for the taxpayer and more certainty for the state, without committing in advance to any single architecture. The building work that follows, from digital identity to privacy-preserving verification, is how that ambition becomes buildable.

Who wrote it

The report was produced by the OECD's Forum on Tax Administration and developed with the support of the Netherlands Tax Administration, which has long championed the seamless-taxation agenda inside the OECD. It was issued by OECD Publishing in Paris.

Citation

• Title: Towards Seamless Taxation: Supporting SMEs to Get Tax Right
• Publisher: OECD, Forum on Tax Administration (OECD Publishing, Paris)
• Year: 2022
• Link: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/towards-seamless-taxation_656c89ab-en.html (DOI 10.1787/656c89ab-en)

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