PwC issues guide with World Bank to global tax systems

The tenth annual evaluation comparing tax systems around the world has been issued by Big 4 firm PwC, in conjunction with the World Bank.

The 'Paying Taxes 2016' study is part of the larger 13th edition of the 'Doing Business 2016 - Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency' report, and it looks at 189 different countries to see how each of their systems can affect companies.

Hypothetical company

The Paying Taxes study uses a hypothetical company and works out how much tax it might have to pay, as well as taking into account how much time employees have to spend dealing with the system and the number of payments needed each year.

In this way, it works out how easy is it for a medium-sized company to deal with the demands placed on it in each location.

Rankings

In the latest study, the UK is ranked 15th, representing a jump of one place from last year. However, amongst the G20 countries, the UK comes in at third place, beaten only by Saudi Arabia (3rd in the overall rankings) and Canada (9th in the general world table).

When all the countries in the survey are combined, the overall tax rate has dropped from 52% to 40.8% over the decade that the study has been running. Over the same period, the number of hours it takes a company to comply with tax systems has fallen by 62 hours to 261 hours, and the number of payments is around 26, a decrease of 8.