The Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB) has been chosen by the Catalan Ministry of Economy to calculate Catalonia’s tax gap. By making this calculation a country can determine the difference between the total amount of taxes collected and the total amount actually owed according to prevailing legislation. In this way, countries such as Sweden, Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the United States estimate the level of tax fraud and so measure the compliance performance of their respective tax administrations.

The contract for undertaking the study is worth 45,000 euros. This will be used to calculate the tax gap, and will include a breakdown of the causes of the shortfall in revenues according to their origin. Specifically, the IEB will study and calculate the part of the gap attributable to the “traditional” assigned taxes and the so-called ‘tourist tax’ (a charge paid by tourists for each night spent in hotel accommodation). The project is to be led by IEB researcher, Alejandro Esteller, while José María Durán-Cabré, the Institute’s executive officer, and fellow IEB researchers, Mariona Mas and Luca Salvadori, will participate in the study. Some of the work is to be subcontracted out to the consulting firm Everis.

Over the last few years, the IEB has defended the use of the tax gap to measure the performance of tax administrations. This was the position adopted by José María Durán-Cabré and Alejandro Esteller when presenting their book, De nuestros impuestos y su administración, to the Economic Circle of Barcelona in July 2015, where the calculation of the tax gap was one of the central topics of debate.