Afghanistan's New VAT, Part 1: Invoice Matching or a Unitary Digital Invoice

Abstract

In the summer of 1990 two groundbreaking articles on business process re-engineering (BPR) were published, one by Thomas H. Davenport (a professor in information technology at Babson College) in the MIT Sloan Management Review, the other by Michael Hammer (a professor of computer science at MIT) in the Harvard Business Review. BPR is a management strategy that analyzes IT-intensive workflow designs and business processes within an organization.

On December 21, 2020 (Jadi 1, 1399) Afghanistan was scheduled to implement a 10% VAT. It has been delayed one year by the pandemic. When it does implement, Afghanistan will have significant workflow design and business process decisions to make. There will be problems, of course, but there will also be great opportunities. The question for Afghanistan is how it will design workflows and business processes with the technological capabilities we have today.

These papers undertake a limited (comparative jurisdictional) study of VAT invoices. Its methodology is to apply BPR principles to the invoice function of a credit-invoice VAT. An assessment is offered on where the leading edge of the invoice design element of VAT practice is today. The hope is that this analysis will be found useful in Afghanistan, or another jurisdiction newly adopting a VAT.

Keywords: BPR, VAT, Business Process re-engineering, Value Added Tax, Thomas H. Davenport, Michael Hammer, VAT Fraud, Fake invoices, Invoice-matching, Unitary digital invoice, Fiscal invoice, Fiji, Sandeep Dosanjh, Pardeep Dosanjh, Fraud bot, Shanghai fraud