The African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF)

Application Deadline: November 3rd 2019

The African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) is pleased to announce the 2nd Africa wide Tax Essay Competition (ATEC) for 2019. The essay competition is designed to encourage young African researchers, academics and tax officials to identify problems or challenges faced by African tax administrations and propose innovative solutions.

THEME:
The ATAF 2nd Africa-wide Tax Essay Competition (ATEC) gives you the opportunity to bring forward your feasible and readily implementable solutions on how African tax administrations can innovatively tax the digitalised economy. Essays should address issues regarding creative ideas that can lead to ground-breaking solutions to the tax challenges posed by digitalisation.

For this year’s competition, participants are required to write on the following topic: African perspectives on the tax challenges from the digitalisation of the economy.

In January 2019, ATAF’s Cross Border Taxation Committee (CBT) critically discussed various proposals and measures on the tax challenges from the digitalisation of the economy. The ensuing ATAF Technical Notes called for fundamental changes to the international tax rules mainly because digitalisation has further led to limited or no physical presence in most African jurisdictions thereby depriving them of their taxing rights.

Furthermore, the prevailing profit allocation rules do not sufficiently reflect the value created for Multinational companies by the brand perception in the minds of the customers in the market jurisdiction. ATAF emphasises that changes to these nexus and profit allocation rules should apply more broadly than to just the highly digitalised businesses (see ATAF’s related technical notes on the ATAF website).  

ELIGIBILITY
The ATAF 2nd ATEC 2019 is open to all African researchers, tax officials, academics and tax practitioners aged 40 or less. Women are strongly encouraged to participate.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

1. The essay must be theme-based and should not have been published elsewhere at the time of submission.
2. The essay must originally be written by the entrant as its sole creator/author. 
3. Plagiarised essays will automatically be disqualified
4. ATAF employees or any official involved in the development, production, implementation, administration, judging or fulfilment of the competition are not eligible to enter.
5. ATAF will reserve the right to publish and disseminate awarded essays.
6. ATAF will not be responsible for any breach of copyright or confidentiality by any author.
7. Winners of the competition will NOT be entitled to represent ATAF in any manner except mention this award in their CV.
8. If an author accepts an offer of publication from somewhere else before being notified about the results of this competition, ATAF must be informed immediately.
9. ATAF will have the final authority to relax any of the criteria in the larger interests of the profession and research.
10. The decision of the Judges on the selection of essays shall be final.
11. Selection of an essay by ATAF will not mean that ATAF endorses or subscribes to the views expressed by the author.
12. The essay submissions shall be evaluated on a first-come, first-served basis
13. The essay will be deemed ineligible if it violates any of the above conditions

ESSAY FORMAT REQUIREMENTS
The essay must conform to the following standard structure or outline:

• Introduction, Problem Statement, Methodology, Key findings, Implications of findings, Key implementable recommendations

The following specifications must be followed:

1. The length of the essay should NOT exceed 1000 words (two pages).
2. The standard format of the essay should be Arial, Font 12, a 1-inch margin on all sides and 1.0 line spacing.  
3. Any uniform mode of citation can be followed for footnotes with Arial, Font 10 and 1 line spacing.
4. Must be submitted as a Microsoft Word file ONLY.
5. A passport-sized photo of utmost 5 MB must be submitted alongside the essay
6. The Essay must be written in English
7. Please NOTE that submissions must include two (02) documents:
   i. The title page should include article’s title, full name, institution, type of institution, job position, mobile number, alternative phone number, country of residence, nationality, country of origin, primary language, secondary language, postal address and email address.
   ii. Anonymised main essay indicating figures, tables (if any) with numbering, title, source and references

Essays that fail to follow these requirements will be automatically disqualified.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 3 November 2019
PRIZES AND AWARDS:
The prizes of the ATAF 2nd Africa-wide Tax Essay Competition 2019 will be as follows:

• First Prize: 1500 USD, a Trophy and an award certificate. The winner will be invited to ATAF’s 10 years Anniversary to be held in Kampala, Uganda from 18 to 22 November 2019 for a special award ceremony with flight and accommodation expenses covered. At the commemoration, the winner will be required to make a presentation of the essay at the presence of all heads of tax administrations in Africa.
• Second Prize: USD 1000, a Trophy and an award certificate.
• Third Prize: USD 750, a Trophy and an award certificate.
• The best 10 essays (including the three winners) will be published in the book of ATAF’s Compilations of Abstracts on Tax Systems in Africa. 
• All other participants will receive an ATEC 2019 participation certificate.

For More Information:

Visit the Official Webpage of the ATAF 2nd Africa-Wide Tax Competition 2019