DG REFORM is supporting the Bulgarian National Revenue Agency (NRA) in addressing the challenges to make a shift in the tax administration's approach towards taxpayers, based more on cooperation than on rigor control and repression. Horizontal Monitoring Model (HMM), developed by the Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration, will be the tool for this new approach implementation, ensuring tax administrative supervision based on trust, mutual understanding and transparency between individual taxpayers and the tax administration. The effort is aligned with OECD's concept of cooperative compliance.

Our overall approach to technical support builds on lessons learned and is based on the following 4 pillars, in order to achieve the sustainability of the reforms:
1) Ensuring country ownership of, and political commitment to reforms via: involvement and commitment of NRA management a) broad and balanced stakeholder involvement; b) careful task sequencing and packaging; c) focus on yielding tangible results that are specific, measurable, monitored and communicated.
2) Tailoring our technical support and improving the capacity and quality of public authorities to absorb reforms via: a) delivering through locally based teams of experts who have a deep understanding of the politico-economic context, challenges and needs of national public authorities, businesses and citizens; b) sound quantitative and qualitative analysis that helps us fully comprehend the status quo of the administrative environment and estimate the reform impacts through modelling techniques; c) providing tools and trainings to improve the skills and capacity of public authorities to absorb and implement reforms.
3) Addressing Bulgarian needs by systematically leveraging on good practices developed by international organisations, the EU and its Member States (MS) via a group of experienced experts on the subject-matter.
4) Providing practical hands-on experience on the HMM via including in the local team a group of international experts who participated in the HMM implementation in the Netherlands. The combination of the local's team consultancy experience and in-depth knowledge of the NRA with the hands-on experience of the international team will be a unique added value for the NRA in their objectives in implementing the HMM.


This results in the following deliverables:

D1: Inception report
D2: Technical report describing the HMM
D3: Operational processes and procedures for the HMM
D4: Report from the pilot testing of the HMM
D5: Training materials and training sessions on the HMM
D6: Communication strategy and materials on the HMM for the large taxpayers and the general public
D7: Final report