This chapter explores the disconcertedness of tax inspectors when performing their job of inspecting businesses’ tax compliance. It shows how a group of tax inspectors experience their focus in work being distorted due to the implementation of a new strategic direction set by the tax authority. To analyse this situation, I draw parallels with Graeber’s work on bureaucracy and dead zones to argue that tax inspectors are engaged in jobs that they cannot make sense of, which lowers their job satisfaction and creates opaque success criteria. Methodologically, the chapter is based on in-depth, qualitative interviews with tax inspectors from the Danish Tax Authority, who all express concerns about their new work. Building on this analysis, the chapter also includes a reflexive part where I present material that shows my own previous interpretation of this state-of-affairs and demonstrates how I was exposed to some of the same challenges as the tax inspectors. The chapter explores a core area for the anthropology of tax, that is, that of the changing strategies in tax administration and the effects that this has on the tax inspectors’ work.

Chapter 2 offers the first full illustration of the trade-off between raising revenue and enforcing the norm of truth reporting. In traditional theories of tax compliance, audits are the primary tool of enforcement. It has been assumed that audits in China are carried out by tax inspection (jicha) bureaus. However, drawing on archival material and a novel dataset, I show that the practice of mandatory taxpayer “self-inspections” predominates in the jicha system. Self-inspections allow the tax authority to raise revenue by foregoing penalties on noncompliant taxpayers, but threaten to erode the government’s deterrence power. By making self-inspections a perennial and integral part of enforcement, Chinese tax inspectors largely abandon the goal of enforcing the norm of truthful reporting. Chapter 2 then pivots to the much larger segment of Chinese tax administration called “revenue management.” Although revenue managers routinely process tax returns, they are even less likely to enforce truthful reporting norms, because of the competition with tax inspection to meet revenue targets and because of a lack of specialization. Therefore, what one might have thought was an immutable component of tax administration – audits – is largely absent from Chinese practice.