Taxes that should fund public services vanish in cash economies where transactions go unrecorded. Goods and services pass across borders and into markets without ever entering official registers. Outdated reporting systems bury tax officials under stacks of paper that fade faster than the memories of those who issued them. For a continent that will soon hold a quarter of the world’s population, such inefficiencies are barriers to growth, equity, and political stability. 

This is the context in which the discussion around revenue assurance has shifted. No longer an administrative exercise, it has become a decisive factor in whether governments can deliver for their people. And at DGA2025, the annual gathering where digital governance takes center stage, one theme will be resonating DTI’s approach: Africa needs the next-generation tax monitoring and reporting solution. 

DTI at DGA2025: The Tax Gap That Refuses to Shrink 

Unfortunately, the continent’s fiscal hole is visible and expanding. According to African Union estimates, countries collectively lose tens of billions of dollars every year through tax evasion, avoidance, and underreporting. Domestic resource mobilization, the polite term for improving tax collection, has been a staple of policy reports for over a decade. Yet, progress remains slow. 

Part of the problem lies in the absence system or having a non-functional system. In many African countries, businesses still handwrite receipts, store them in filing cabinets, and present them to auditors months later, if at all.  Tax authorities have no ability to verify what is accurate and what has been altered. In the meantime, governments run deficits, and citizens lose confidence that taxes are collected fairly. 

This vicious cycle affects budgets, yes. Moreover, it shapes politics as well. When citizens suspect that the tax net is full of holes, they question why they should comply. When businesses know competitors can underreport with little risk of detection, they feel disadvantaged. And when governments lack reliable revenue, they turn to external borrowing, often at steep interest rates, locking future generations into repayment cycles that stifle development. DTI will focus on finding answers to these questions as well, during the participation at DGA2025.

Why Technology Matters Now? 

The call for “next-generation” digital tax monitoring and reporting solution is quite pragmatic. Traditional audit-based tax systems were built for economies where transactions happened on paper, within easily tracked supply chains, and in relatively small numbers. Africa’s economies today are different. 

From the sprawling informal markets to the fast-growing digital payments sectors, millions of transactions happen every second. Capturing them with old methods is impossible. Now more than ever, what is needed is not more auditors with clipboards but systems that can record data in real time, analyze it instantly, and flag inconsistencies before they turn into losses. 

Countries in the Pacific, where DTI is heavily engaged, like Fiji and Samoa have shown what happens when governments shift to real-time monitoring of sales and value-added taxes. Compliance rates rise. Honest businesses welcome a fairer playing field. And tax authorities finally have the clarity they need to plan national budgets with confidence. African governments should examine these examples closely, as they won’t seem as distant experiments but as models that are highly adaptable to their own realities. 

DTI at DGA2025: View from the Ground 

For years now, DTI has worked hard to build TaxCore®, a COTS solution that fits the technical capacity and economic conditions of each country we work in. In practice, that means that our solution is capably to thrive in various tech environments, record every transaction at the point of sale, issue secure digital receipts and feeds the data instantly into tax authority databases. It is a system that removes the uncertainty of manual reporting and builds a continuous chain of evidence from seller to state. 

From DTI’s perspective, the value of such a system goes beyond technology. TaxCore® brings fairness into the fiscal relationship. Taxpayers see that compliance is not discretionary, but they also gain relief from arbitrary audits and burdensome paperwork. Governments receive clarity not through guesswork but through data they can trust. 

“Revenue assurance is not about raising taxes,” as Goran Todorov, CEO at DTI explained in a recent discussion. “It is about collecting the right taxes, consistently and transparently. When the system is fair, trust follows.” This emphasis on fairness should resonate across African capitals too. From Kigali to Lusaka, finance ministries understand that their citizens will support reforms only if they believe the rules apply equally to everyone. And this is exactly why digital tax monitoring becomes an excellent administrative tool. A tool that goes far beyond what is technically intended for, as it can serve as a pragmatical instrument for building legitimacy. 

The Informal Sector: Africa’s Persistent Puzzle 

Still, the road ahead is not simple. Africa’s vast informal economies, ranging from open-air markets to small family enterprises, pose a challenge we saw in other regions of the world. By some estimates, more than 80 percent of employment in sub-Saharan Africa exists outside the formal system. Asking these businesses to suddenly comply with digital reporting may seem unrealistic. 

Yet, this is precisely where next-generation revenue assurance can make a difference. Instead of expecting informal vendors to fill out paperwork, governments can offer them simplified digital tools linked directly to tax authority platforms. Mobile receipts, QR codes, and offline-enabled applications can capture data without disrupting daily trade. 

Countries that have experimented with such approaches report early signs of progress. Vendors who once resisted taxation begin to accept it when compliance becomes simple, when systems are accessible in local languages, and when the benefits, such as access to credit or eligibility for government programs, are visible. 

DTI at DGA2025: A Continent-Wide Moment of Choice 

What makes the discussion urgent now is not only the scale of the losses but also the timing. Africa is entering a demographic surge that will shape the global economy for the rest of the century. By 2050, the continent’s population will double, with millions more needing schools, jobs, and infrastructure. Governments cannot meet this demand if they continue losing revenue to inefficiency and underreporting. 

International donors have long filled some of the gaps, but dependence on aid is increasingly seen as politically and economically unsustainable. Domestic revenue is the only durable source of funding for development. That is why finance ministers from across the African continent are pressing harder than ever for practical solutions. 

At DGA2025, where digital governance leaders from around the world will gather, revenue assurance is not expected to dominate conversations, but DTI will raise this important topic across the board. It is obvious that African officials know that the continent cannot afford another decade of delay. They also know that adopting next-generation systems requires political will, technical training, and above all, trust between governments and citizens. 

The Stakes for Global Confidence 

We must be frank. Africa’s fiscal debate is not confined within its borders. International lenders, investors, and rating agencies watch closely. When governments demonstrate they can collect taxes efficiently, their creditworthiness improves and interest rates on loans decline. Thus, foreign direct investment becomes more attractive. Revenue assurance we talked earlier, in this sense, is not only about balancing national budgets but also about strengthening Africa’s place in the global financial system. 

The opposite is equally true. Countries that fail to modernize remain trapped in cycles of debt and dependency, forced to pay higher premiums for capital while struggling to maintain basic services.  

Toward a Fair Fiscal Future 

DTI’s message at DGA2025 will echo this reality: practical digital tax monitoring is essential. It is the foundation of fair and transparent fiscal governance. With the right tools, Africa can reduce its dependence on external financing, restore confidence in its institutions, and give citizens tangible proof that taxes collected are taxes put to work. 

As Sam Koim, the Commissioner General of Papua New Guinea’s Internal Revenue Commission, recently said in a related discussion about his own country’s reforms: “The idea is not for taxpayers to pay more, but to pay right.” And, Africa’s challenge is no different. The continent does not need higher taxes; it needs taxes collected fairly, consistently, and transparently. That is the promise of next-generation revenue assurance and the reason it cannot wait. 

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Paying taxes is one of the fundamental principles of any country in the world, it is considered a duty of every conscientious, grown citizen. And while in some countries, citizens are aware that paying taxes benefits them, in others, they don’t.

Why Efficient Tax Collecting Matters

Having an efficient tax collecting system is one of the most important points any government should focus on. After all, this is what survival of a country and its nation depend on. Paying and collecting taxes allows governments to invest into infrastructure, health care, and education.

Unfortunately, developing countries are in a state where their citizens won’t, or very often can’t, fulfill their tax-paying duties. And even though one would think this is a problem only in the 3^rd world countries, 1^st world countries are not immune to tax evasion either. In 2017, the EU suffered a tax loss of 137.5 billion Euros.

Although it may seem like a lot of lost money, statistics show that the European citizens pay their taxes for the most part. The EU will definitely find a way to fight tax evasion, but its citizens still enjoy good public health care and education.

In African countries, however, things are different. Developing countries collect only a small part of taxes, approximately only 10%-20% of the overall GDP. In developed countries, it is more than double compared to this. An important question is raised here – what exactly is stopping developing countries from collecting taxes from their citizens?

The most obvious answer is the lack of political transparency. The institutions in these countries tend to be weak, and the freedom of the media is on a low level. Some of these countries also went through conflicts in their recent past – civil wars or wars for independence. All of this represents seemingly infertile soil when it comes to a good taxing atmosphere.

Additionally, most developing countries rely on sales taxes than personal taxes. This is mostly because the first one is easier to administer.

The most important part of tax collecting is having transparent politics where the citizens know exactly what their tax money is being spent on. Holding the statesmen accountable for everything they do with taxes gives a lot of power to people. They are allowed to have demands, and it feels like this is the culture that needs to be nurtured.

Moreover, statistics say that transparency plays a more important role than forcing citizens to fulfill their tax duty when it comes to tax revenue.

Tanzania can serve as the perfect example of how a lack of transparency and accountability by the statesmen can have a devastating effect on a country’s budget. The tax collection rate in Tanzania is barely over 12%.

In 2018, Mussa Assad, the controller and auditor general presented his annual report of 2016/2017. The report discovered that the country has spent 25.3 trillion Tanzanian Shillings into ghost ventures. This is equal to $10.88 billion. Accordingly, there was a lack of documents from the Ministry of Finance, such as “the proper cash book for the consolidated funds and bank reconciliation statements that provide crucial underlying information for the figures under verification.”

The issue is obvious, Tanzania is not successful in its attempts to keep a record of its transactions. More importantly, public institutions, such as the Ministry of Finance, refuse to share the information with the public. This manner of behavior allows them to remain uncountable for all the mismatches in numbers.

There Is a Solution

Now that we’ve established how transparency is the key to better tax revenue and higher GDP, how can a certain country accomplish it? The solution hides in modernization and using advanced technologies that are at the reach of our fingertips.

Data Tech International developed TaxCore as a solution that can help both developed and developing countries collect taxes more efficiently. TaxCore has been implemented in Fiji and is currently being successfully implemented in Samoa. There are many reasons why it is a state-of-the-art solution – the most evident one being the fact it offers complete transparency.

Once a local tax authority fully implements the TaxCore platform into its system, it becomes capable of following every single receipt printed out to a customer. This allows for tax authorities to regularly check whether any tax or vat fraud is occurring, or if a certain business is regularly printing receipts to the consumers. Secondly, it is a platform that takes advantage of modern technologies to their full capacity. Constantly using internet connection means that every single business is directly connected to the local tax office 24/7. This leaves no space for any fraud to pass unnoticed.

In cooperation with the governments, TaxCore even found a way to motivate customers to ask for receipts by introducing the CCA (Customer Compliance Award) program. The program motivates businesses too, as it can help them shape their marketing campaigns around it, attracting even more customers.

Data Tech International realized how modern technologies can significantly help in the fight against tax evasion, and we’ve successfully proved that this can be done successfully and easily with TaxCore.

To find out more about how TaxCore can help governments all over the world, feel free to get in touch with us.

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DTI and Avatar had a mission, and it was to explain that digitalisation of invoices can greatly help tax authorities fight tax evasion and VAT fraud. The point was to show many benefits of such systems, starting from small things such as motivating the consumers to ask for their receipts.

Many African countries tend to struggle with this as consumers still didn’t grow a habit to always expect a receipt. This helps the grey economy a lot as many irregularities remain under the radar; completely undetected by tax authorities.

This serves as a firm proof that real-time transaction data from a taxpayer to a tax office is possible. Although many authorities over the world are still quite used to the systems devised at the beginning of the 21^st century, bringing technology into this story can only help taxpayers comply.

What seemed to be the most important was the fact this solution comes at no or very low cost. This was the perfect inspiration for both African and the rest of the countries to consider implementing these new models into their system.

SEE AGENDA HERE- ZM2015-103

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