About

Tax Authority Index answers one question at a time, per jurisdiction and per power: does this tax authority hold this enforcement power — and what is the evidence?

What this is

Every affirmative claim in the matrix carries a verbatim quote from its source, plus the source URL. There is deliberately no composite “strictness score”: scores hide judgment calls, and per-power evidence exposes them instead. See the full methodology for how each status is assigned, and coverage for what is and isn’t in the data yet.

How a claim gets published

A claim is only published with a quote and a source URL attached to it. A verification job re-fetches every cited source weekly and re-checks the quote character for character. If a quote can no longer be found — the page changed, the law was repealed, the link moved — the claim is automatically withdrawn. It degrades to “not yet assessed” rather than being left standing as if nothing happened.

Statistics that authorities publish about themselves — audit counts, compliance yield, prosecutions, the tax gap — are reproduced exactly as each authority states them. They are never ranked against each other, because every administration defines these terms differently. See sources for the full list of datasets behind the site.

What we refuse to do

• No composite score. A single number cannot carry eleven separate judgment calls honestly.
• No dressing up silence as “no”. “Not yet assessed” is a real, distinct state — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
• No circumventing a source that blocks automated access. If a site refuses the request, it is recorded as blocked, not worked around.
• Nothing on this site is tax, legal or immigration advice.

Known gaps

Some tax authorities publish annual statistics the project cannot reach because the host blocks automated requests; those sources are recorded as blocked, not silently dropped. China is not currently in the matrix, because its tax administration reports mainly in Chinese. And five of the eleven enforcement powers rest on administrations’ own survey answers — labelled “derived” — rather than on independently quoted law. All of this is visible on coverage.

Corrections and contact

The fastest way to fix an error is to send the primary source. Write to underworldseo@gmail.com.

Licence

The compilation is licensed CC BY 4.0. Cite it as “Tax Authority Index, taxauthorityindex.com”. The underlying facts belong to their cited sources — see sources and the per-claim citations in data.