Action Plan for Preparing the Implementation of the Haitian Fiscal Code

The Fiscal Code was adopted in the Council of Ministers on 19 December 2022 and published in Le Moniteur on 20 January 2023, but it takes effect only on the first day of fiscal year 2024-25. This document is what the Ministry of Economy and Finance proposed to do in the interval. It was written by the Comité de Politique Fiscale, which had drafted the Code itself since 2010 with IMF fiscal-affairs and legal-drafting missions, and it starts from the observation that the Code is a substantive instrument: the General Tax Code and the Book of Tax Procedures set the base, rates and enforcement rules, and neither reorganises the tax administration, builds its capacity or reforms its governance.

Six workstreams follow: publicising the Code among taxpayers and revenue staff; aligning the surrounding legal and regulatory texts; building the capacity of every entity involved in the reform; strengthening services and adapting collection tools; adapting the tax administration's IT and statistical systems; and launching a set of structural reforms reaching the territorial collectivities and the courts that hear tax appeals. Implementation deliberately runs through existing bodies rather than new ones, coordinated by a sub-committee of the CPF alongside the DGI's reform unit, with monthly progress reports.

The document also names the risks to the October 2024 date, among them political-governance change, the security climate, emigration of qualified public-administration staff, a hiring freeze, delayed technical assistance and simple procrastination. Read against the Code, it is the operational half: the Code says what the tax system will be, this says what has to be built before it can be applied.