Making Tax Smart: Feasibility of Distributed Ledger Technology for Building Tax Compliance Functionality to Central Bank Digital Currency

The latest advancements in distributed ledger technology (DLT) and payment architectures such as the UK’s New Payments Architecture present opportunities for leveraging the hidden informational value and intelligence within payments. In this paper, we present Smart Money, an infrastructure capability for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) which enables real-time value-added tax split payments, oversight, controlled access, and smart policy implementation. This capability is implemented as a prototype called Making Tax Smart (MTS), which utilises the open-source R3 Corda DLT framework. The results presented herein confirm that it is feasible to build an MTS capability which is scalable and co-exists with the current payment systems. Smart Money CBDC has the potential to mobilise payments data, transforming the role of money from a blunt instrument to a government policy sensor and actuator without disrupting the existing money system. DLT, smart contracts, and programmable money have a crucial role to play with benefits for government departments, the economy, and society as a whole.