The national workshop in Lusaka is part of the UNCTAD project on the “Statistical measurement of tax and commercial illicit financial flows to enable more targeted policy action” in Ghana, Namibia and Zambia.

Zambia was among the twelve pilot countries in Africa who joined the previous DA11 project and tested the proposed methodologies from the UNCTAD Methodological Guidelines to measure tax and commercial IFFs, which has been refined based on countries’ feedback. UNCTAD released in 2023 the technical paper “Towards a Statistical Framework to measure tax and commercial IFFs” incorporating those feedback for further testing.

Zambia is focusing specifically on measuring trade misinvoicing, with Method#1 – Partner Country Method Plus, and Method#2 – Price Filter Method Plus, and aggressive tax avoidance or profit shifting with Method#3 – Global distribution of Multinational Enterprises’ (MNEs) profits and corporate taxes.

This workshop aims at getting the key national agencies together to refine unofficial estimates calculated in 2022, with the objective of reporting the final official results on the Global SDG Indicator Database for indicator 16.4.1. Another objective will be to discuss the linkages between measurement and policy formulation.

The participants come from the national Technical Working Group (TWG), composed of relevant national agencies working together to compile statistics on IFFs.