Programmes

Most training treats the budget as a document. We treat it as the moment a legislature either exercises or surrenders control of the executive, and we teach officials to read it for the power it moves rather than the numbers it lists.

Who should attend

Cabinet offices and ministries, treasury and public finance officers, members of budget and public accounts committees, boards and finance directors of state corporations.

1. 1. The hidden balance sheet: guarantees, partnership commitments, arrears and state corporation exposure
2. 2. Debt service as a prior claim: how borrowing and external conditionality pre-commit a budget before allocation begins
3. 3. The gap between appropriation and execution: cash rationing, commitment control and the arrears cycle
4. 4. Pricing a sovereign guarantee and provisioning for contingent liabilities
5. 5. Fiscal rules that bind and fiscal rules that are evaded: institutional design against political incentive
6. 6. Capstone: a fiscal risk and accountability framework defended before cabinet and public accounts scrutiny

Devolution is taught almost everywhere as administration. We teach it as a standing contest over money, won or lost in the drafting of a single clause, and we do it on the constitutional text rather than on generalities.

Who should attend

County executives and treasuries, members of county assemblies, revenue allocation and intergovernmental bodies, county drafters and auditors.

1. 1. Contesting the division of revenue: the criteria, the recurring disputes and the arguments that succeed
2. 2. Re-engineering the horizontal formula: parameters, weighting and the distributional consequences you can model
3. 3. Own-source revenue that survives challenge: the constitutional limits and the drafting they demand
4. 4. Property rates and land value capture: valuation rolls, buoyancy and the revenue counties never collect
5. 5. Subnational borrowing and the liabilities concealed in leases, pensions and pending bills

Widening the revenue base without breaking the livelihoods that are the base is the central fiscal problem of a developing economy. We teach it as a craft, with the costing and the incidence analysis that turn a wish into a policy.

Who should attend

Tax policy units, revenue authority managers, finance committee members, ministries weighing new revenue measures.

1. 1. Costing what the state gives away: tax expenditure measurement, incentive review and sunset design
2. 2. Reaching wealth: high-net-worth risk profiling, offshore holdings and shelter structures
3. 3. Taxing where records are thin: presumptive design, digital payment data and informality
4. 4. Behavioural response and revenue estimation: buoyancy, elasticity and forecast credibility
5. 5. Carbon, extractive and solidarity instruments, including zakat, in their legal and fiscal setting
6. 6. Capstone: a medium-term revenue strategy costed, sequenced and drafted into law

A treaty signed decades ago still decides what your treasury may tax today, and most were written to favour the other side of the table. We teach officials to read that text for what it concedes, and to rewrite it.

Who should attend

Treaty negotiators, international tax units, ministries and committees that advise on or ratify treaties.

1. 1. Auditing a treaty network for revenue leakage: which agreements to renegotiate, and in what order
2. 2. Where source states lose most: services, technical fees, capital gains and offshore indirect transfers
3. 3. Anti-abuse in practice: the principal purpose test, limitation of benefits and the Multilateral Instrument
4. 4. Pillar Two and the qualified domestic minimum top-up tax: what to enact, what to forgo and what it yields
5. 5. The United Nations Framework Convention: protocols, negotiating positions and the African agenda
6. 6. Capstone: a national treaty policy and a negotiating mandate defended across the table

Profit leaves a country through prices set between related parties, and each transaction looks ordinary on its face. We teach the analysis that proves it and the audit that recovers it, including the comparables problem no textbook solves.

Who should attend

Transfer pricing and audit units, international tax officers, large taxpayer offices, revenue boards.

1. 1. Functional analysis where the contracts do not match the conduct
2. 2. Pricing intangibles, brand and hard-to-value transfers
3. 3. Intra-group finance, parent guarantees and thin capitalisation
4. 4. Building an audit without comparables: proxies, databases, safe harbours and simplified approaches
5. 5. Defending the adjustment: documentation, advance pricing agreements, mutual agreement procedure and litigation risk
6. 6. Capstone: a risk-based case selection and enforcement programme for a large taxpayer office

More than fifty billion dollars is estimated to leave Africa each year, and it leaves in plain sight through ordinary commercial records. We teach officials to see it, interrupt it and bring it back.

Who should attend

Revenue and customs, financial intelligence units, prosecutors, anti-corruption and asset recovery agencies, immigration and border services.

1. 1. Measuring the flow: estimation methods, national risk assessment, and what the figures can and cannot bear
2. 2. Trade-based laundering: misinvoicing, customs valuation and mispricing in commodity and mineral chains
3. 3. Piercing the corporate veil: nominees, trusts, professional enablers and beneficial ownership
4. 4. Financial investigation across borders: intelligence, tracing and building an evidential chain
5. 5. Freezing, forfeiture and repatriation: non-conviction-based routes and the negotiation of return
6. 6. Capstone: a national counter-flows strategy with its inter-agency architecture and enforcement priorities

A single clause can surrender a generation of fiscal sovereignty, and it is usually one nobody read closely. We teach officials to find the red flags in a live contract and to draft the green flags that protect the right to tax and to regulate.

Who should attend

Negotiating teams, attorney general and legal units, procurement and public private partnership units, boards of state corporations, oversight committees.

1. 1. Pricing the fiscal exposure in a concession before it is signed
2. 2. Stabilisation clauses and the true cost of freezing a tax and regulatory regime
3. 3. When a fiscal measure becomes an expropriation claim: arbitration exposure and the defences available
4. 4. Guarantees, indemnities and the management of the contingent liability portfolio across government
5. 5. Renegotiation and dispute avoidance in a contract already in force
6. 6. Capstone: a model contract and a negotiation playbook for a sector, defended against a counterparty team

A provision rarely fails because it was badly drafted. It fails because the instruction behind it misread the economics or the behaviour. We teach the context that lets a drafter interrogate the instruction before the loophole is enacted.

Who should attend

Legislative drafters and parliamentary counsel, law reform commissions, tax policy and legal units, committee legal advisers.

1. 1. Why provisions fail: post-legislative diagnosis of enacted law and the point at which it broke
2. 2. Anti-avoidance architecture: specific rules, the general rule, and how courts have treated each
3. 3. Drafting against the schemes already in circulation, and anticipating those that follow
4. 4. The treaty interface and the boundary between primary and delegated legislation
5. 5. Costing a bill: revenue estimation, compliance burden and regulatory impact assessment
6. 6. Capstone: a bill drafted, loophole-tested by a rival team and defended against a taxpayer’s bar

Value now crosses your borders without leaving a taxable trace, and the rules that once caught it were built for warehouses and factories. We teach officials how to tax presence that has been engineered away.

Who should attend

Tax policy and international tax units, revenue authorities, ICT and digital economy ministries, regulators.

1. 1. Dissecting a platform structure: where value is created, where profit is booked and why the two diverge
2. 2. Choosing the instrument: significant economic presence, digital services taxation, withholding and their trade-offs
3. 3. Platform collection obligations and enforcement against non-resident suppliers
4. 4. Data centres, connectivity and incentives: pricing what is granted against the revenue forgone
5. 5. Cryptoassets, virtual asset service providers and the reporting obligations that reach them
6. 6. Capstone: a national digital tax strategy tested against treaty, trade and enforcement exposure

A neutral-looking tax can fall hardest on the poorest household, and an algorithm can entrench that outcome behind a claim of objectivity. We teach officials to measure who really pays and to govern the systems that now decide.

Who should attend

Tax policy and social protection units, digital government teams, equality and oversight bodies, revenue authorities deploying automated systems.

1. 1. Incidence modelling: who bears a tax once it has shifted, and how to demonstrate it
2. 2. Microsimulating a reform across households and firms before it is adopted
3. 3. Gendered incidence, unpaid care and the fiscal treatment of women in informal trade
4. 4. Interrogating an algorithmic system: inputs, proxies, training data and disparate outcomes
5. 5. Explainability, human review and liability when an automated decision causes harm
6. 6. Capstone: a fairness and accountability framework for an automated revenue or welfare system

The state already holds the data that would let it see risk coming, and rarely uses it. We teach officials to turn what they hold into foresight, and to govern innovation through a sandbox instead of a ban or a blind eye.

Who should attend

Revenue analytics and research units, policy and planning departments, regulators and supervisory authorities, digital economy ministries.

1. 1. Turning administrative data into risk scores, case selection and early warning
2. 2. Revenue forecasting and nowcasting under uncertainty, and the disclosure a decision-maker is owed
3. 3. Microsimulation for policy appraisal, and communicating a result a minister can act on
4. 4. Designing a regulatory sandbox: perimeter, safeguards, testing conditions, exit and graduation
5. 5. Governing artificial intelligence in revenue and regulatory administration
6. 6. Capstone: a data and innovation governance programme, with the legal basis for inter-agency data sharing