About this episode

What does it actually take to build a tax system that works for governments, investors, and citizens at the same time? In our first episode, Daribatech's co-founder and CEO Jay Riche sits down with Dan Witt, President of the International Tax and Investment Center (ITIC), recorded live in Dubai.

With 35 years advising governments across more than 80 countries, Dan brings a rare combination of candour and expertise to the big questions in global tax today. Jay and Dan cover why Digital Services Taxes have consistently failed to deliver, why the UAE and the wider Gulf are setting the benchmark for modern tax design, how technology is letting developing nations leapfrog the West, and why simplification, not more complexity, is the only path to higher compliance and better revenue.

A wide-ranging, provocative, refreshingly honest conversation about the future of tax.

Key Takeaways

Five arguments made in this conversation

Why Digital Services Taxes have failed. Dan explains what the DST experiment was meant to do, why the revenue never materialised, and what governments learned the hard way.

The UAE and Gulf as the new template. Why regional tax authorities are, quietly, setting a standard that OECD members are increasingly studying.

Leapfrogging via technology. How developing economies are using digital tax infrastructure to skip a generation of legacy systems the West is stuck with.

Simplification beats complexity. The counter-intuitive argument that the fastest way to raise compliance and revenue is to make the rules easier to follow, not harder.

What Pillar Two looks like from the inside. A candid read on how the global minimum tax is actually landing in the countries implementing it.