Assessing the impact of a new digital tool for property tax management in Dakar

Preliminary work by the reasearch team shows that **the property tax collections in Dakar were only 9 percent of their potential, due to significant structural constraints **(incomplete cadastral maps, absence of harmonized address systems, limited administrative resources, obsolete registered property values). The difficulty in administering property taxes constitutes an extensive loss of revenue that hinders the development of the Senegalese capital.

To fill the gaps in a poorly performing property tax system, the Paris School of Economics (PSE), in collaboration with the Senegalese General Directorate of Taxes and Domains (DGID), has developed and implemented a new system for managing this tax in Dakar.

**Thanks to a digital app, the administration can conduct large-scale property tax, through which information on taxpayers and their real estate is updated and the tax base is expanded. **At the same time, the use of satellite data completes the system and is used to reliably estimate the fair value of real estate. Tax bills with geocoded addresses are printed, to facilitate revenue collection.

Fiscal censuses have covered 80% of the neighbourhoods selected for the project (which targets 97 cadastral sections in Dakar covering more than 40 000 parcels).

FID financial support enables the program to carry on and the impact evaluation to be conducted in order to measure, in particular, the tool’s effectiveness in terms of tax revenues, tax equity and the effects of increased tax pressure on citizens’ interactions with local and national institutions.

The impact evaluation will provide an understanding of the real impact of the digital property tax managing system.

• Updated tax data collection, updated cadastral information
• Increased property tax revenues
• Increased city budget and tax authority capacity, funding for new local public services
• Increased local political participation of citizens, improved functioning of local democracy
• Strengthening cooperation between administrations
• Improved tax equity