Tax and Technology

S. 5621. Introduction

Digitalization has driven taxpayers as well as tax administrations to a situation with a lot of requirements, data to handle, and interests to cover. There are many opportunities for improving the interaction with tax law through technology. The aim of the following paper is to discover if and how one of these opportunities can be found in coding law into process modeling language.

1.1. Problem Statement

Humans as well as technologies interacting with tax laws need to understand them in order to apply them in a compliant manner. A unified language is the base for creating common understanding. For the time being, tax law is, to the greatest extent, provided in the traditional form, i.e. words. From this form, different problems arise. One has been existing since time began – the potential for different interpretations and understanding of the words. Although people have found means to deal with this problem, the number of cases in front of tax courts shows that not all misunderstandings can be interpreted away. The second one becomes visible when trying to communicate tax laws to technology. For applying tax laws in a digitalized, automated way, we need to find a commo...