Key ideas

• Some problems are just local. Yet in many cases, national and international events have effects on poverty at the local level.
• Tax is collected from people, distributed through the Ministry of Finance budget and spent through the state to pay civil servant salaries and public services. Yet, corruption, misallocation and inefficiency prevent this system from functioning.
• Corruption of public funds is stealing from taxpayers.
• A common problem in governments is the lack of funds to pay for public services. Big foreign companies can contribute their share through tax.
• Big foreign companies make their profits from using resources in our country. They should pay tax where business is done and profits are made.
• Big foreign companies provide some jobs and sometimes build schools or roads where they operate. But this is very little compared to the big profits they make by not paying their fair share of tax.

Possible tools

1. The national cow – tax makes the budget grow
2. Leaky pot – corruption, misallocation and tax avoidance
3. The tax biscuit – who is eating all the biscuit?
4. Chapatti diagram – who collects and spends tax, locally and nationally
6. The tax scale – tax holidays for locals or for big companies?

Resources

• ActionAid’s Tax Power Campaign Reflection-Action toolkit, ActionAid, 2015.