Developing countries face challenges in achieving tax frontier, which lead to low tax capacity that cause budget imbalances and enforces government to finance recurrent expenditure or developing projects through loans, and risking a country into higher debt dependence. Performance of tax revenue caused by endogenous and exogenous factors but improving some fundamental factors in the economy tends to improve tax revenue performance significantly. This paper intends to establish evidence on potential tax determinants which influence tax revenue performance from 1999 to 2016; the analysis tested the developed hypothesis of whether potential tax-determinant influence tax performance in Tanzania. A model includes four-factors; economic, structural, institutional, and financing factors, results revealed potential tax determinants significantly influence tax revenue performance. Mining share and loan indicate positive effects and statistically significant while government effectiveness affects tax revenue negatively and significantly. Other variables; manufacturing, construction, transportation, services, the rule of law, regulation quality, and control corruption were positively affected tax revenue while foreign direct investment negatively affects tax revenue, both insignificantly. Findings suggest to emphasise more on improving share on influential sectors with caution on FDI and mining, increase dependence in non-agriculture sector, increase transformation change in industrialisation, informal sector, and urbanisation with the intention of boosting economic growth and bring more payers into the tax net.

tax ratio, tax determinants, coefficient, Tanzania