Die kroatische Mehrwertsteuer: Ursprüngliche Intention, legislative und administrative Fehlentwicklungen

This paper analyzes the Croatian legislation on Value Added Tax (VAT) during the period 1995-2008. First, we describe the most important VAT reforms. We show that the preferential tax treatment of particular products and industries fails to reach the tax legislator's economic and socio-political objectives. Despite some changes of the VAT law since 1999 the Croatian VAT is characterized by relatively infrequent reforms and few distortions, compared to international practice. However, the neutrality properties of the VAT are substantially distorted by the administrative practice. Although the tax law clearly states that input VAT is deductible, tax authorities routinely try to prevent deduction of input VAT. We describe the tax authorities' typical procedures to achieve this goal. To analyze whether the VAT also receives particular attention by the judiciary, we evaluate 389 verdicts of the Croatian Supreme Administrative Court. It can be shown that the VAT is prone to litigation, especially since 2005. The frequency of VAT-related lawsuits can be mainly attributed to inadequate administration of the VAT by the tax authorities. As a result of our analysis, we show that simply interpreting the law is not sufficient for a comprehensive analysis of tax effects. Rather, it is necessary to include legislation, executive, and judiciary.