Feb 1, 2016

Leading Effective Tax Administration Assessments

We hosted the first workshop for the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool Team Leaders. The purpose of the workshop was to clarify the role and responsibilities of the team leader throughout all the phases of the assessment process relating to team management and stakeholder engagement, explained Justin Zake, Chief of Unit from TADAT Secretariat.

TADAT Team leaders should be able to effectively lead a diverse team and in the process ensure a high quality assessment and effective communication with country authorities and other stakeholders. Engaging in communication may appear to be simple, but it is one of the more complex things that people do. With this in mind, TADAT Team leaders  got familiriazed with core dialogue skills which will help them lead purposeful conversations and meetings with team members, tax authorities, sponsoring organizations and other stakeholders.

To master these skills they took part in several role play exercises that were mimicking a probable real life situation where they would need to engage in a productive dialogue with different stakeholders (e.g. labor unions, NGOs, media, politicians, etc.) in order to get them better informed about the Assessment Team's role. Such excercises helped them get a feel for approaches that are likely to work, and for those that might be counter-productive.

TADAT Team Leaders also learnt about the implications of the Helicopter Model of Leadership and ways to apply it in practice.The model emphasizes the importance of being able to rise above the specifics of a particular situation and see it in its overall context and environment.

The event that took place on January 18–21, 2016  concluded on a successful note and we are looking forward to explore synergies and ground for further co-operation with TADAT Secretariat to help our constituency identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of their systems and use this as a basis for further reforms. We believe that TADAT and our own initiative are mutually reinforcing and can substantially influence and strengthen the framing of governments’ reform plans for revenue administration systems.

To get an overview of event's highlights visit Storify.