Highlights  Tax practice rather than being used to regulate order to bring about accountability, is used to resist the established order, revealing the contested nature of taxation.  Tax practice enables agents to act in accordance with anti-hegemonic norms while paying lip service to hegemonic norms  Culture mediates taxation practice, resulting in 'selective enforcement'.  Anancy culture envelops tax administrators' social being and shapes their knowledge, their relationships and their practices  Tax administrators use anancy culture through anancy tactics of 'evasive neutrality' and 'mouthings' to generate regulated behaviours which are not based on objective patterns such as rules.  Even though colonialism has ended, anancism continues to live through the Jamaican people in the form of resistance.

Tax administrators are empowered by the state to secure compliance with tax obligations. Enforcing compliance on the ground is complex, and street-level administrators often engage in the "art of the possible," leading to dilemmas in the field. This paper examines tax administrators' practices with regard to Jamaican property tax defaulters with outstanding tax liabilities in excess of 3 years. Drawing on interviews with tax administrators and other key agents, we find that tax administrators reposition themselves from objective enforcers to empathizing officials engaging in schemes of action, doing what they can do rather than what they should do. This is a practical-sense approach to securing compliance. We identify two forms of empathy, assimilated and cynical, and conclude that administrators' empathetic identification with defaulters does not necessarily arise solely from concern for social cohesion, or inter-subjective compassion, but also sometimes from self-interest.

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