The author is a member of the I.M.F.’s Fiscal Affairs Department. In this paper he considers measures to simplify taxation in East Africa. The adaptation of tax legislation to rapidly changing political and economic situations is well illustrated by the East African experience over the past 20 years. Some of the East African developments are described. With regard to the income tax in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, adaptation to environment took place in two major phases. During the first phase, which lasted until 1958, adaptation showed itself principally in a growing legal sophistication, much of which was aimed at countering avoidance of tax. The second, post 1958, phase showed adaptation in the form of simplification and involved abandoning certain tenets of fiscal theory. Later developments were; reducing the categories of machinery admissible for relief and introduction of a rollover principle (1961); a withholding scheme (1965).
