"Our purpose is to help transform tax and fiscal systems in developing countries through greater adoption of innovative technology and capacity building."

Revenues in 39 of the world’s 75 poorest countries are inadequate to finance basic state functions, let alone the additional investment needed in physical infrastructure, education, health and social protection to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Research shows that when tax receipts rise above 15% of GDP, governments can more sustainably fund their work, which in turn may lead to more rapid economic growth and investment.

The World Bank, MIT, EY, New America, and the Boston Global Forum Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership recently formed a new collaboration, called the Prosperity Collaborative (“Collaborative”), focused on creating better tax systems through innovative technology. Our work focus on building and deploying new technology for tax and fiscal institutions, improving local capacity, and promoting open source and transparent technology governance models. 

We came together out of recognition and alignment around a few core observations: 

  • Improving institutions can lead to improving societies. Revenues in 39 of the world’s 75 poorest countries are inadequate to finance basic state functions, let alone the additional investment needed in physical infrastructure, education, health and social protection to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Research shows that when tax receipts rise above 15% of GDP, governments can more sustainably fund their work, which in turn may lead to more rapid economic growth and investment. 
  • Innovative technology has the power to transform tax and fiscal systems. Advances in technology have the potential transform these systems by: (i) improving trust between taxpayers and government through creating more efficient and transparent digital tax systems; (ii) improving efficiency and overall capacity within governments through the use of technology to digitize and automate processes, as a part of the concept of AI-Government; and (iii) increasing overall tax compliance through both broadening the tax base by making it easier for taxpayers to pay taxes as well as through identifying and eliminating sources of persistent fraud. 
  • A multi-stakeholder approach is needed to maximize our collective impact. No single institution has the capabilities and legitimacy to develop and implement innovative technologies on a wide scale. A multi-stakeholder collaboration can overcome these hurdles by leveraging our individual strengths. 

Our work will focus in three core areas: 

  • Developing new technologies. We partner with local countries and our network of stakeholders to build and deploy technology that solves needs commonly shared across tax administrations. 
  • Improving local capacity. We engage directly with local countries to configure solutions to their specific needs as well as coordinate training and other resource development efforts. 
  • Promoting open source technology governance models. We advocate for transparent governance models and will release software via open source or equivalent models to facilitate local country configuration, increase interoperability and lower implementation costs, and encourage collaboration. 



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