“Training in Citizenship”: Tax Compliance and Modernity

Abstract

Do the attempts of modern states to foster tax compliance reflect wider attributes of modernity? This article analyzes the history of the creation of a tax compliance culture in Israel of the 1950s and the various practices, techniques, and discourses that were deployed by the state to create model taxpaying citizens. It shows how the specific history of tax compliance can be understood as part of a wider phenomenon: the desire of modern states to create self‐policing, normalized subjects. By interpreting the history of tax compliance critically, as part of the attempt of the state to control its citizens, the article suggests a new way of understanding the history of twentieth‐century tax compliance generally and more specifically the history of judicial attempts to tackle tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Tax

“…As such, the tax system hinged on an extortion logic, rather paid not in return for services or representation, but rather for protection of land and livelihood in a context where it was the state itself that was threatening to take these away (Sheild Johansson 2018 These discussions dovetail with explorations of tax and governmentality (the powerful processes by which the state makes governable subjects through the shaping of habits, aspirations, and beliefs), although the latter's approach is driven not by libertarian ideology, but by an analytical focus on power. In this body of work, tax relations are understood as both a means through which to shape citizens into governable subjects (that is, tax relations as tools for governmentality), and the goals of broader processes of governmentality which will result in compliant taxpayers (Likhovski 2007). An early Foulcauldian analysis of tax as a disciplining technology is Alistair Preston's ethnography of a music production company in the United Kingdom (1989).…”

“…This includes a focus on both the oppressive and liberating effects of tax. As a tool for oppression and subject-making, tax policies and practices have been analysed as Foucauldian disciplinary technologies that mould people into self-policing taxpayers (Hobson 2004;Likhovski 2007); they have also been scrutinised as part of hegemonic colonial systems where they are, at best, out of touch with taxpayer logics (Sheild Johansson 2018), and at worst, instruments of racist oppression (Willmott 2020). But taxes are also held as tools of redistribution in a battle against growing global inequality (Maurer 2008;Piketty 2014), the key to sovereign power in the face of dominant financial logics, and the means through which economically just and environmentally sustainable futures might be built.…”

Professionals' Contribution to the Legislative Process: Between Self, Client, and the Public

“…Another provides that income received by one as a result of a revocable disposition by another shall for income tax purposes be seen as accruing to the disponor, again defining “disposition” to include “trust” and defining “revocable” broadly to include any case where the disponor, his wife, or her husband retain a direct or indirect power to reassume direct or indirect control over the income or the assets yielding it (§25). A final provision imposes what is now known as a General Anti‐Avoidance Rule: it provides that the assessing officer may disregard any disposition, trusts included, which reduces the amount of tax payable and that is, in his or her opinion, artificial or fictitious or that “is not in fact given effect to” (§28; see Likhovski 2004, 345, 367–77; 2007, 670–82; Alter 1985, 207–49; Leibovich 2008, 273–368).…”

A study of the changing relationship between large corporates and the Inland Revenue

“…His concern was to "explore the mechanisms which lead to individuals and organizations taking up the explicit and implicit injunctions of the Revenue... [I]t is concerned with connections, connections between the Revenue and organizations, connections between the Revenue and the individual and finally connections between accounting and Revenue practice" (Preston, 1989: 411). Likhovski (2006) The CRAKA project, for which I was the research fellow, looked at the changing discourse within the IR Tuck, 2001a, 2001b;Lamb, Tuck and Hoskin, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c. A key aspect of this research was that it examined the role of strategic discourse in constructing new "customer services" as well as improved "customer service" using publicly available documents and a small number of interviews (five) in the IR.…”