4 - Returning Responsibilities to Taxpayers

Summary

Atomistic coercion generates an “equilibrium:” it would not make sense for any actor to change their behavior unless all actors change their behaviors at the same time. Chapter 4 demonstrate this with a recent, provincial tax administration reform. Echoing the 1997 tax administration reform agenda (which nationally had been abandoned), tax administrators in Jiangsu advocated “returning responsibilities to taxpayers,” i.e. enforcing the norm of truthful reporting. But reformers faced a predicament. Inaccurate information on tax returns makes it difficult to improve audits. The government’s capacity for observing most taxpayers could thus not hope in the short term to surpass that of revenue managers. But if direct personal monitoring of taxpayers declined because of reform, the government risked lowering compliance. The paramount objective of securing tax revenue pressures tax administrators to continue relying on traditional means of coercion, which undermines the government’s ability to threaten punishment for non-compliance beyond the traditional set of requirements. The objective of holding taxpayers accountable for truthful reporting thus remains elusive. Chapter 4 illustrates this dynamic through a novel dataset on the outcomes of a new type of audit function, “intermediate risk response,” that Jiangsu reformers instituted.