Daniel Witt

International Tax and Investment Center (ITIC)

Daniel Witt is the president of the International Tax and Investment Center (ITIC), which he helped found in 1993. ITIC is a multinational, non-profit organization that is helping to lower barriers to tax, trade and investment in transition economies by facilitating the exchange of information and know-how between Western executives and government officials in these countries. It has offices in Washington, Moscow, Almaty, Astana, Kiev and London.

Since 1991, Mr. Witt has led over twenty delegations to Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Vietnam to hold meetings with top finance, taxation and parliamentary officials. One such visit, in March 1993, led to the signing of co-operation protocols between his delegation and the Russian and Kazakhstan governments, which paved the way for the founding of ITIC. In May 1999, Mr. Witt signed a new protocol of co-operation with the Kazakhstan Ministry of State Revenues.

Prior to assuming the duties as president of ITIC, Mr. Witt was the executive director of the Tax Foundation, the oldest tax and budget research organization in the United States. In this capacity, Mr. Witt helped to dramatically improve the organization's financial situation, more than doubling its revenues from $800,000 to $1.7 million. In that time, the organization's credibility for objective, reliable data increased substantially, with over 3,000 media mentions in 1993 alone.

Prior to joining the Tax Foundation, Mr. Witt was vice president and director of membership with Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a 250,000-member Washington-based public interest group. He first joined CSE as director of privatization and transportation and has authored numerous public policy papers, including the CSE monograph Myths About Transportation Deregulation.  In this capacity, he also served as a consultant to President Ronald Reagan's Commission on Privatization.

Before joining CSE, Mr. Witt spent two years traveling in the Pacific and East Asia as a Rotary International Foundation Fellow. He was a visiting economist with the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research and Victoria University of Wellington, where he published a book on the deregulation of the New Zealand motor car industry. While overseas, Mr. Witt made over 75 speeches on international trade and economic policy.

He received a B.A., magna cum laude, in Public Administration and an MBA in Finance from Western Michigan University. In June 1999, Mr. Witt was elected an honorary professor of economics of the Kazakh State Academy of Management. He is married to Barbara Kelly, formerly a vice president at Chevy Chase Federal Savings Bank and now a licensed clinical social worker. They reside in Washington, DC wth their two year old twins, Alexandra and Theodore.