12 - Dead Zones of Tax Inspection: The New Strategic Direction in the Danish Tax Authority and Its Consequences for Front Staff

Summary

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.

This chapter explores the disconcerting feelings tax inspectors experience when performing their job of inspecting businesses’ tax compliance. In brevity, it shows how a group of tax inspectors experience their focus in work as distorted due to the implementation of a new strategic direction set by the tax authority. To analyse this situation, I draw parallels with David Graeber’s (2012) 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 got exposed to some of the same challenges as the tax inspectors. The chapter explores a core area for the anthropology of tax: that of the changing strategies in tax administration and the effects that this has on the tax inspectors’ work.

Bureaucracy and Dead Zones

Theoretically, this chapter draws on David Graeber’s work. I am concerned with his critical analysis of bureaucracy – a key contribution of his to the literature on the anthropology of the state (Graeber 2012). As a starting point, Graeber presents the notion of structural violence which refers to the boring, humdrum, and subtle – or indeed not so subtle – threats of physical force that lie behind everything surrounding bureaucratic enforcement. In this understanding of violence also lies the threat of a changing allocation of scarce resources within and out of a system. Graeber points out three important aspects of structural violence: He argues that those that maintain bureaucratic systems, upon discovering that they will regularly produce failures, conclude that the problem is not with the system itself, but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved. Moreover, he identifies that structural violence avoids any kind of debate which is typical of more egalitarian relations. And lastly, he mentions that what can evoke a violent reaction from the dominators is if someone challenges their right to define a situation. In essence, Graeber sees structural violence as ‘any institutional arrangement that, by its very operation, regularly causes physical or psychological harm to a certain portion of the population, or impose limits on their freedom …’ (2012: 112).

To this introduction of structural violence, he connects a discussion of interpretive labor which is the act of figuring out what is going on. Graeber states that those who enact structural violence – those who rely on fear and force – are not ‘obliged to engage in a lot of interpretive labor, and thus, generally speaking do not do so’ (2012: 116). On the other hand, those who are victims of structural violence tend to perform interpretive work in their attempts to understand the situation. If these then produce any alternative interpretations of the situation, the assumption is that someone will wield structural violence against them.

Graeber insists that within this interpretive labour there are dead zones. These are areas of bureaucratic life that are so devoid of any interpretive depth that they seem to repel any attempt to give them meaning. These are spaces where interpretive labour no longer works. Graeber then returns to his own experience of navigating in an absurd bureaucratic setting, and states that these dead zones temporarily can render anybody stupid. It is not just the victims of structural violence who become bewildered, it is also – here – the anthropologist describing those who become stupid because sense cannot be made of the situation.

Using Graeber’s Ideas in Analysis

Under normal conditions, I would view Graeber’s analysis as too dystopic: he simply does not believe in bureaucracy. I, in contrast, believe in bureaucracy. Having studied tax inspectors’ work and the Danish Tax Authority (Boll 2014b, 2015, 2016), I have found that the tax administration enacts the most positive sides of a Weberian office where ethical and professional office holding is centre stage. However, this position of mine was challenged during my research a few years back. During this time, I conducted the interviews upon which this chapter relies. Listening to the narratives of these interviewees about their work situation at the operational core of the Danish Tax Authority, I became concerned as they univocally expressed their feelings of resignation. Moreover, immediately after these interviews, I gave a presentation that illustrated their work situation to the Danish Tax Authority. I was then on the receiving end of a very harsh counter-reaction from the Danish Tax Authority personnel present, an episode that I will return to in detail below. I was left wondering: Why did the tax authority’s reaction to me presenting this work take such a confrontational form?

I recognised that the interviewees and my presentation of them had revealed a face of the tax authority that I was unfamiliar with and that required new analytical tools to understand. My interest in drawing parallels to Graeber’s work grew out of this. I have resisted my temptation to discard Graeber as too radical in order to analyse both my interviewees’ and my own experiences of conflict. Instead, I find his ideas apt to capture the absurdity and power conflict at play in this particular engagement with the state authorities.

There are other anthropologists who have analysed the state and its dysfunctions. In The Absurdity of Bureaucracy, Vohnsen (2017) describes how policy implementation works in distorted ways. She says that she takes the ‘absurdity to be a perspective the human can move in and out of and not an objective condition that underlies and orders social reality’ (Vohnsen 2017: 22–23) – a perspective which I follow in this chapter. Furthermore, key studies such as Gupta’s (2012) on structural violence in India’s bureaucracy, and Mosse’s (2004) reflections on how state policy implementation is a development practice driven by a complex multilayered set of relations, are focused on how state bureaucracy (and implementation of policy) functions. In this line of work, Lipsky’s (2010) street-level bureaucracy is also relevant, as it portrays the challenges of front-line work – which is the focus of this chapter too. Together, this literature serves as the background for this study, with Graeber’s concepts at the centre of it.

The New Strategic Direction

In the period from 2007 to 2012, the Danish Tax Authority introduced a new strategic direction for its organisation by launching a number of unparalleled changes in its organisation to meet political demands for creating a more effective tax administration. Commenting on the organisational changes in this period, Christensen Grønnegård and Jespersen (2018) write that these changes show that the tax authority had a dream of a more efficient organisation where the authority would solve its core tasks of collecting revenue for a fraction of the existing costs for this: ‘… it is no exaggeration to say that they wanted it all for half the price’ (my translation, Christensen Grønnegård & Jespersen 2018: 12).

Over the following pages, I introduce some of the key initiatives that the civil servants in the strategic apex (Mintzberg 1980) of the tax authority implemented. Using Mintzberg’s classic terminology, the strategic apex refers to the top managers of the tax authority, which are located centrally in Copenhagen, Denmark. As I will show, the sense that this strategic apex makes of the new strategic direction stands in contrast to the sense-making of the operational core (e.g. Mintzberg 1980) of the organisation. The operational core refers to the bottom of the organisation where the tax inspectors make the actual ‘production’ in local decentralised tax units. When I talk about sense-making in the chapter, I refer implicitly to Weick’s (2015) classic understanding of sense-making in organisations.

One fundamental change initiated by the strategic apex was that the tax authority started to work with risk analysis and to segment taxpayers as either opponents, modspillere, or co-players, medspillere. Amongst opponents, the risk of intentional non-compliance was seen as high, while it was low among co-players. This segmentation was used to provide differentiated treatment: opponents were targeted with sanctions, while co-players received increased service. This was seen as cost-effective for the tax authority since resource-demanding tax inspections would then only be used for opponents. The majority of the Danish small- and medium-sized businesses were classified as co-players – over 95 per cent – while only around 5 per cent were identified as opponents (Boll 2014a). For instance, one would be segmented as an opponent if Value Added Tax (VAT) settlements over a longer period were not reported on time. This idea was inspired by research conducted at the influential Australian Center for Tax System Integrity – which ran from 1999 to 2005 – where John Braithwaite (2003) and Valery Braithwaite (2003) pioneered ideas of differentiated treatment of taxpayers. Moreover, the approach was also promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2004, 2010).

Another change in the organisation was a radical transformation in the way the overall performance of the Danish Tax Authority was measured. Previously, a central performance indicator was how many tax audits the tax inspectors completed. The new performance indicator discarded this output focus and replaced it with an outcome focus. Onwards, focus would be on measuring how various activities led to an outcome in the form of higher levels of tax compliance. Moreover, it would be measured how activities from the tax authority would increase the customer satisfaction amongst the taxpayers. Now, the aim was higher levels of tax compliance and customer satisfaction, and the methods to achieve this could include myriad activities, not just tax audits. For example, if activities such as campaigns, service visits, workshops, or informational mailers led to higher levels of tax compliance and satisfaction, then these activities were as important as resource-demanding tax audits.

This transformation in performance indicators was seconded by yet another change; a drastic downsizing of tax inspectors – demanded mainly from Danish politicians. Between 2005 and 2012, the Danish Tax Authority was to reduce its staff from approximately 12,000 employees to 7,000 employees (Rigsrevisionen 2008). This target was met around 2014–2015, where the tax authority had fallen to around 7,500 employees. Employees had been laid off and others not replaced after either retirement or change of job. This substantial decrease in manpower was also only feasible if the overall performance indicators of the tax authority were changed. With the reduced number of employees, it would be impossible to uphold the previous number of tax audits. Yet, the strategic apex argued that it would indeed be possible to meet or even increase the levels of tax compliance and customer satisfaction if the remaining tax inspectors worked in a smarter way.

In the rest of the chapter, these organisational changes are referred to as the new strategic direction of the Danish Tax Authority. In essence, it is the implementation of these changes by the top managers that resulted in increased bewilderment, insecurity, distancing, and lack of sense in the operational core. Hence, where Graeber uses the figure of the ‘bureaucracy versus citizen’ as a lens for carving out dead zones, I use the figure of the ‘strategic apex versus the operational core’ inside a bureaucracy as the focus for the unhealthy power relations.

The Setting

The chapter builds on nine in-depth qualitative interviews conducted in the spring of 2012. The interviewees were active tax inspectors accustomed to working with VAT, personal expenses, accounts, tax assessments of businesses, money transfers, and so on.¹ Most of them had been working for the tax authority for several years and what united them is that they all once worked with classic tax inspections – with focus on reactive tax audits and inspection of documentation – but had been made to reform their practices when the new strategic direction was adopted. Now, they work on projects with myriad different activities to increase tax compliance and customer satisfaction. The setting for the interviews was the inspectors’ offices in an office park located in a rather green suburban area in a remote part of Copenhagen.

I began my data collection with these interviews, but at the time, I also planned three additional fieldwork sessions where I would follow local tax inspectors at work. I made an appointment with my contact person at the strategic apex of the tax authority, with whom it was decided that I could first spend one week doing intensive participant observation of work related to inspection of negative VAT in Jutland, seven hours away by train (Boll 2018). And second, that I could observe a project that engaged in a targeted inspection and regulation of the cleaning sector – a project where many of the new working methods were used – also implemented in a local decentralised tax unit outside Copenhagen (see Boll 2016). And third, that I could interview and follow inspectors doing field inspections of forcefully closed down businesses (see Boll 2015). I was able to write about most of the fieldwork, except the initial interviews.

The Incident

The reason why I have not – until this chapter – written anything on the interviews is that they quickly transformed into a curse. Only a few weeks after having conducted the interviews and prior to the other scheduled elements of my fieldwork, I was invited to give a presentation on the changes within the Danish Tax Authority to a Master of Public Governance class at Copenhagen Business School. I was informed that my primary contact person at the Danish Tax Authority with whom I had negotiated my fieldwork would be an audience member. This person was the primary gatekeeper for my upcoming fieldwork, placed at the strategic apex of the tax authority, and worked on the implementation of the new strategy.

I began my invited lecture by presenting the major organisational changes in the tax authority in a way similar to how I introduced it above. Then I presented a number of outcomes of the new strategy, as experienced by my interviewees; these will be introduced in detail below. Immediately, interrupting my presentation, the tax authority representative criticised my research. He felt strongly that I had not given enough credit to the efforts of the strategic apex of the Danish Tax Authority to advance the process of the new strategy and that I had insufficiently outlined the challenges that this brought out. Furthermore, he found it peculiar that I could draw these critical conclusions based on what, to his mind, was a very small sample.

Although this was one reaction, the most severe reaction occurred the following day. Apparently, he had reported my conclusions to his superior at the tax authority. I became aware of this when he, in collaboration with a head of department, sent me an e-mail describing how they saw my presentation as biased, as not relying on substantial data, and as unacademic. They described me as a microphone holder for critical voices in the tax authority. Finally, and what was most impactful for my work, they wrote that we needed to discuss our further collaboration and my scheduled fieldwork, since they doubted that our collaboration could continue.

Based on this, a senior research colleague and I immediately sought a meeting with the tax authority. At this meeting, we stressed my right to conduct independent research, but I also apologised for my blunt presentation and acknowledged that I could have presented the material with more nuance. The tax authority representatives accepted this, and agreed to allow me to continue my research collaboration, with the condition that I would keep them informed about my findings. They also insisted on reviewing my article manuscripts (that used data from the fieldwork) prior to publishing.

Challenging Interpretations

I had not anticipated this reaction from the tax authority. I saw my presentation as critical, but also as providing meaningful insights into the challenges of implementation, which I apparently erroneously assumed the tax authority would be interested in hearing. Reflecting, however, at the situation with Graeber’s framing in mind, several new insights emerged. First, the way that the tax inspectors at the operational core made sense of the new strategic direction challenged the way that the strategic apex saw the new direction as clear and sound. The managers saw the new strategic direction simply as a success. Second, the tax authority reacted to this counter definition presented in my work by threatening to close down my access to fieldwork elsewhere in the organisation and, furthermore, threatening me with monitoring in the form of examining my article manuscripts prior to their publication, a sort of rescinding of my academic and intellectual freedom. As Graeber aptly noted, debate, clarification, or negotiation – which are typical of more egalitarian relations – is not part of the relationship between the powerful and the powerless, but fear of force is. Third, and interestingly, I now also – inspired by Graeber – saw myself as rendered stupid in the situation. Why had I not digested the material more before I presented it? Why did I not voice more reservations about my conclusions? Why had I not realised that what I had observed in the interviews was just one small part of an endless, complex fabric of human circumstances (e.g. Graeber 2012: 120)? My blindness to such nuances, Graeber would probably say, stemmed ultimately from my trying to navigate through this power-saturated situation, where I became absorbed in viewing the tax inspectors, and myself, as victims.

Disconcerting Work Experiences: The Opaque Successes of Tax Inspectors under the New Strategy

As introduced, one of the previous central performance indicators for the tax authority was output. In this paradigm, tax audits were divided into different types, depending on their depth and workload. The tax inspectors knew how many audits they were required to make monthly and knew approximately how much revenue each of them had managed to settle. This situation was first captured by Jon, when he said that:

… when the year was about to close, well, then our bosses hit their fists down on the table and said; ‘drop everything’ we still need results! At that point in time, we measured the results. We were simply measured on how many tax audits we made … . Those were the numbers we used to measure. And it was happening in a way ‘it was beaten into our heads’ that you need to go out and settle that revenue.

Dennis explained the same situation in another way:

You know, earlier it was something about counting tax audits. And those were evaluated with a fine-toothed comb by our managers. By the end of the year we were hysterical about reaching our goals … . We needed to reach 500 tax audits, and then 499 was a catastrophe, and 501 was an enormous success … . That was also not a perfect world. But, now it is very diffuse what our criteria of success are. I am not knowledgeable about – and have not thought about – whether the projects that I have been in are successes; if they have influenced the levels of tax compliance. … And, there is none of that sentiment of whether you are on the right track … . There is nothing of that kind now. At least, I have not experienced this, if we’re going in the right direction and holding the direction. I do not know who has that overview. Somebody has to have that overview, but it is not something that diffuses down the organisation [to us].

With the transition to the new performance management system, the central aims of the Danish Tax Authority were to increase the level of tax compliance in society and increase the customer satisfaction amongst the taxpayers, and indeed also to lower the tax gap, that is, the gap between the total taxes owed and the total taxes paid on time. The success of any tax inspector is, therefore, how he or she contributed to any of these rather abstract goals with his or her daily activities. This difficult link was established through project work, since all projects ought to document how the activities in the projects added to any one of the outcome goals. Therefore, project activities were the crucial link between individual and organisational performance. But the way project activities added to any of these goals was not necessarily always evident – as suggested in the citation above. Needless to say, this difficulty was also known to the strategic apex, yet my aim here is to show how this was experienced by the tax inspectors and how they genuinely could not tell when their work was a success.

Another tax inspector, Else, emphasised that in fact ‘a project can be a success without you actually making any cases [tax audits]’. To this, another inspector, Morgens, commented that he did not know when something was a success either, and that in particular, he did not know when he himself was a success. He said, ‘I have regulated/settled for ZERO Danish kroner [this period]. Despite having gone through a sea of cases, I have not settled anything.’ He explained that there was no revenue in the cases that have been selected in his project. This, he said, had gone on for the last fourteen months.

These interviews highlighted how tax inspectors are deeply in doubt about what exactly they contributed to the goal of increasing the levels of tax compliance when working in alignment with the new strategic direction. Their reflections show that they, as inspectors and actors of the state, have difficulties seeing their own successes as they were not completing many investigative cases, nor were they settling much revenue. Together, they expressed a clear frustration with how success, for them, had become opaque. This was squarely a result of their work being realigned to fit with the new strategic direction. It was in such reflections on their place in this bureaucracy that Graeber’s concept of the dead zone came forth. For the tax inspectors in the operational core, the new strategic direction had redefined their daily lived experience of work until it got so foreign as to be devoid of meaning.

Lowered Job Satisfaction

It was clear from their explanations that the difficulty in understanding one’s own success also had negative consequences for the tax inspector’s job satisfaction. Jesper, for instance, explained that before the new strategic direction he could see how his work made a difference:

… and it is precisely in relation to this point that ‘my chain has come off’. I cannot see if I make a difference. I cannot see that I process a certain number of taxpayers, … I cannot see that I make any difference.

Importantly, this was not only because the link to the effects of the work were now vague, but also because much less work could be done due to personnel cuts. He moreover explained that:

… when we are told to complete 100 tax inspections, well then we find that this is fine. But when we go to 100 pizzerias and there are problems in 99 of them, resource wise we can make one case [one tax audit]. The rest we just have to close, despite it being obviously wrong what happens out there. But, we do not have the resources to make the cases. That is one of the things that adds to the feeling that we do not suffice. If we do not feel that we are sufficient, well, then we go home annoyed and depressed. We do not feel that we do the work that we are supposed to do. We also have morals; we also take pride in [in our work].

Jesper continued his reflections with his colleague Steen, explaining both how much they enjoy their inspection work and that they hold a profound sense of professional pride connected to this. They want to do tax inspections, to bring money to the national treasury, and to make sure that everybody contributes. However, they also agreed that inspections were not what they used to be, and they pointed to the source of this change as the new working methods brought by the new strategic direction. In their minds, the inspections they now perform are meaningless due to the new constraints on resources. Expressing the same stance in another conversation, Else simply said that ‘there is none of the same enthusiasm’, in comparing her feelings towards her work from before and after the change.

Karoline provided a more detailed account of what she considered challenging: over the course of one interview, she recounted details about a project she was working on that she liked very much and personally regarded as successful. This project targeted business owners who withdrew personal expenses from their business accounts. Karoline explained that there was a great deal of fraud in this particular area – close to 50 out of 100 cases would have instances of this, and she and her colleagues managed to complete many inspections targeting this kind of fraud when working on the project. However, she explained that the project was forced to close so that its resources could be used elsewhere. To this she reacted:

The project was a ‘stepchild’ [in relation to the new strategic direction]. It was pushed through by my manager towards a vice director … . But he [the vice director] thought it ‘smelled’ too much of normal control. And in relation to the new strategy, which is about patting taxpayers on their heads, well then there was too much control in that project ….

Hence, despite her seeing the work both as relevant and highly effective at increasing tax revenue and compliance, the project was down-prioritised and ultimately shut down because it did not align with the new strategic direction. The experiences and reflections of the tax inspectors on their own work show that their new work realities resulted in what I call a moral bewilderment and diminished sense-making. Due to the new strategy and the concomitant extreme downsizing, the shared experience of the tax inspectors was that important cases had to be dropped due to the lack of resources to handle them. This caused them to enter a moral bewilderment at their workplace. Furthermore, the tax authority no longer prioritised their classic tax audit and inspection work, which was liked by tax inspectors. This cast into sharp relief that the new strategy had a number of unfortunate consequences for the tax inspectors at the operational core. The new strategy simply led to a work practice that was critical in the eyes of these tax inspectors. Clearly, they found their new work situation distressing. However, what also emerged here – drawing parallels back to Graeber’s ideas – was a form of structural violence as the strategic apex acted violently against the tax inspectors by closing down specific avenues of work that made sense to them. In addition, the perception of their jobs mirrors Graeber’s (2018) definition of a ‘bullshit job’ because tax inspectors could not see that they made any difference in their work.

Hypocrisy

As a consequence of the new strategic direction, the tax inspectors spoke repeatedly about the drastic fall in the number of tax audits, as also noted above. Jon said, for instance, that ‘… it [the number of audits] is not at all at the same level as previously. …’. In some years, his efforts to curb tax evasion had resulted in collecting over 50 million Danish kroner (close to £6 million) per year. Now, he lamented, what he brings in from his work ‘is peanuts in comparison’. A similar sentiment was expressed by Jesper:

we have witnessed that our effectiveness has slowed considerably … . The number of cases, the number of rulings, the number of regulations. It has all changed dramatically. It has gone vertically down directly. This is something that we are very aware of and this relates to our working morale.

Echoing this sentiment, Lene simply said, ‘Our money pours out of the national treasury.’ Similarly, Karoline said, ‘At the bottom line, there is an enormous sharp decline in efficiency. Together, their reflections on their contributions to the national budget highlight how displeased the tax inspectors became as a result of the structural changes of their workplace.

In relation to these drops in the number of inspections, a recurrent theme the interviewees expressed was that the strategic apex of the tax authority – the group heading the new strategy – will not talk about these problems, which led to the feeling that the new direction was characterised by hypocrisy. For example, while discussing the employees at headquarters, Jon remarked that they ‘are not so fond of numbers’, that is, the numbers that could show how many tax audits and regulations are being performed at the present moment. He elaborated on his dismay that:

If this [the current number of tax audits] was measured, then everyone would be disappointed with the results. They [the tax audits] are crashing to the ground. And then the politicians would say, ‘Hey, what the FUCK?’ But then they [the managers] have changed this, and now, well, no one [at the strategic apex] dares say anything about these numbers out loud, right! ‘REGULATION NUMBERS’ [he shouts out loud with his hands shaking in the air]. There is no one who dares say this.

For Thomas, this had the consequence that he experienced that any single case became less important:

[finding] that big regulation, or the fact of making a well researched case, well, that does not mean so much anymore. Because everything is focused on how everyone [i.e. the taxpayers] should become more compliant and satisfied … . In that context, a single case does not mean anything. All of our work is related to the overall effect. In relation to this, one can get the impression that a tax inspector who makes the ‘good case’ is in fact not that important anymore.

This sentiment was endorsed by Lene, who said that ‘at times, [the project managers] are not interested if there is any money in the cases; it is only the overall level of compliance and customer satisfaction that they look at’. And whether this tax inspector effectively regulates a taxpayer for as little as 5,000 Danish kroner (less than £600), or a much higher amount, is irrelevant, as long as the activities change the ‘tax compliance level’, she explained. Commenting on the same matter, Morgens described that one reason for not talking about these numbers was that it would be too embarrassing for the managers and the organisation to admit and show this. Touching upon the same issue, Karoline commented that she viewed the new strategy as almost a religion in the organisation:

Well, for me, [the new strategy] is a kind of religion. Our [differentiated] treatment strategy is a religion that we are stuck with because we will not admit that we were wrong … . We have people in the organisation who, when dealing with different cases, have said ‘we know that this is wrong, but we still do it’. Amen!

She continued, saying that it was sad to her that no one could say something like ‘well, we thought this was the right thing to do, but it was not and now we need to do something else’. Instead, there was no consideration of the strategy based on sense. She described it like a road with ‘dry cement’ that could not be changed, and that this was a waste of the taxpayers’ money. She commented that basically, if the tax authority were a private company, it would go bankrupt because it does not collect enough revenue. The larger calculations on whether or not the tax authority collects enough revenue are not my main concern here. Although it should be noted that following the period in which my interviews took place, Danish politicians began to grant much more resources to increase the manpower of the tax authority after the initial cuts. Therefore, not around 2012 – but later – a shift in the strategy occurred.

Different Perceptions of Reality

Ultimately, a recurring theme amongst the tax inspectors interviewed was an explicit description of a divergence in viewpoints and understandings between themselves and the headquarters of the tax authority, that is, the strategic apex. Morgens provided an expression of this, who said, ‘We have no relation to the headquarters at all. None at all. And, as I understand, there are nearly 1,000 employees there.’ Jon also mentioned another example of the clash between the local, decentralised tax units and the headquarters in Copenhagen. He complained that he experienced that much of the previous focus on supplementary training, for instance, by providing a brush up on new legislation, was no longer available to him or his colleagues in the new strategy universe. In response, the headquarters suggested that the tax inspectors could form local ‘study groups’ to study the new legislation. He recounted that:

The word ‘study group’ we laughed a lot about it. Who the hell sits in a study group to look at new legislation? There is not one single person in the tax authority who does that. So, this came from the headquarters … . Bloody hell, at that point in time we could not stop laughing. Oh, damn well, it was comical, it really was. Well, maybe it was a humorous proposal? … . Shit man, oh, oh, what a round. They just suggested this to show that there was no need for [real] training. No, it just gets worse and worse, right?

Morgens expressed a slightly more calm description of the difference as follows:

I think there is a giant difference between how the headquarters looks at things and how we see things here. A mega gap. But we do not know much about the headquarters, or anything, right? But well, I think these are worlds apart. That I do believe.

A clear statement about the view of the headquarters also came through in the conversation with Jesper. He spoke about who felt the impact from the cutbacks in person-years most, expressing:

Well, then there is that experience, ‘who does this hit the most?’ I think it is felt very differently. For you can say, those in the headquarters, they have always been sitting there, they have a cool premises there; they have all kinds of things in there. Where you can say, we who are in the operational part of the organisation have to do the dirty work [in relation to the cuts in person-years]. That is a major problem. Creates distance. And it could very well be the case that they are sitting inside the headquarters saying that ‘we’ [inspectors] are in a bad mood and cross and always difficult to be with. Yes, but we are not close to power. We are not sitting with a bowl full of money. It is always us who bear the burden. That is a problem.

As if this was not enough, the tax inspectors are also working with very old systems for case handling. Steen explained:

Well, yes it [the case handling systems] functions haphazardly. As I used to say; we have a case handling system, and if I were to compare this to a passenger car, then I used to say that it looks like a Trabant car, which for the last 25 years has been used as a hen house in a Siberian village. Now you know what my opinion is about that.

This shows that there is a major distrust between the different parts of the tax authority’s organisation. The tax inspectors at the operational core express a very clear disassociation from the strategic apex, they feel disempowered, and that they are given low priority in terms of resources. This resonates with how classic organisational theory portrays organisations as social systems where there are necessarily different points of view and where logics in one level of the organisations can be difficult to understand at other levels because employees operate as distinct individuals in complex social systems (Roethlisberger & Dickson 1934). It is also noteworthy that these tax inspectors feel that the strategic apex regards them as ‘in a bad mood and difficult to be with’; it is they as persons who are wrong, not anything with the new strategic direction, that is, the entire system and functioning of the tax authority, as Graeber would have said. The tax inspectors’ assumptions regarding how those in the headquarters see them show that the tax inspectors feel they are underappreciated or devalued; they are the ones not wanting to learn about new legislation in study groups. They are the ones, by extension, responsible for any failure of the tax authority.

The Dead Zone

It should come as no surprise that I found it disconcerting to listen to the experiences of the tax inspectors. From their point of view, they have difficulty seeing their own achievements in daily work and experience a lower job satisfaction because of this. They regard the managers (i.e. the strategic apex) as hypocritical because they fail to communicate the existing challenges while treating the new strategic direction as a religion that all employees should follow. And they perceive a massive distance between them and the strategic apex.

Drawing parallels to Graeber’s work, I have shown that tax inspectors operate in a dead zone where their daily work is erased of meaning they can use for a sense of reward. Despite this, the interviews make apparent that tax inspectors engage in continuous interpretive labour in their efforts to try to make sense of their daily work situation under the new strategic direction. However, they can discern no sense in it, only a great deal of frustration which they direct at the strategic apex. Therefore, they cannot meaningfully make sense of what is happening despite engaging in interpretive labour to understand their situation.

Moreover, as already indicated, tax inspectors are exposed to subtle structural violence. The managers in the tax authority have had the power – first and foremost – to lay off these employees as the transition occurred during a period of severe downsizing of the organisation. This was a clear and present danger to the tax inspectors. Furthermore, managers hold the power to reallocate resources for work, for example, closing projects to instead prioritise projects and work that were aligned with the new strategic direction. This holds a direct parallel to how Graeber sees that force can lie in the threat of changing the allocation of scarce resources within and out of a system.

What is also recognisable in this analysis of the dead zones of work is that there is no recognition that there might be anything wrong with the new strategic direction as such – but rather that it is the tax inspectors who are unable to collaborate. As Graeber writes, the powerful defines that ‘the problem is not with the system itself but with the inadequacy of the human beings involved …’ (2012: 108), that is, the tax inspectors. This clearly resulted in the tax inspectors becoming demotivated; they could not see their work efforts and they could not resist this upheaval. They had simply to conform to this new way of working.

I have used the methodology section to argue that I was also absorbed in a dead zone enacted by the tax authority. This happened as they questioned my interpretation of the situation and as the tax authority subtly threatened to close my subsequent fieldwork. Paraphrasing Graeber, I was momentarily also rendered stupid, or at least less conscious about my situation, in the saturated power relation as I presented the tax inspectors’ work with a blindness to the more complex fabric of all human circumstances that I could have adhered to in more detail. Hence, there is a parallel between how both the tax inspectors and I were treated by the tax authority.

Pushing Back on Graeber

For Graeber, all bureaucracy was absurd. This is not my standpoint. I see the dead zone described in this case as an abnormal temporary situation. What happened after the situation in 2012 was, first, that several severe scandals relating to the tax authority’s administration and procedures went public. The scandals regarded poor administration and were related to the various points raised by the tax inspectors in this chapter. The inspectors in this case were not directly involved in making this public. That was done by other tax inspectors with similar experiences, and journalists. Second, what was realised in the wake of these scandals was that the tax authority needed to alter its strategy and receive more funding from the government to expand its programmes and its workforce. The impact of the cutbacks on manpower was acknowledged as simply too damaging for the tax authority and its ability to conduct its core task of collecting revenue. With this in mind, I find the dead zone of meaningless work an abnormal situation that was acknowledged and changed for the better. In this sense, I use the case to push back on Graeber by arguing not for general bureaucratic absurdity, but for a temporary severe disconcertment.

Conclusion

This chapter has shown how a new strategic direction was taken up by the Danish Tax Authority, and how this affected a group of tax inspectors at the operational level of the organisation. One key change was a move from measuring output, for example, the number of tax audits, to measuring outcome, for example, how different activities influenced the overall level of tax compliance. Since this was a more abstract and difficult relation to measure, the tax inspectors started to become insecure as to how their work influenced organisational goals and became insecure as to when their work was a success. The new strategic direction also included a downsizing that came into effect at the same time as a new strategy for segmenting the taxpayers and only targeting the ‘opponents’ with harsh sanctions was being implemented. The consequence of this was that the tax inspectors experienced that they could only do a fraction of the work that they felt was needed. Cases that were obviously in need of scrutiny, they needed to dismiss due to lack of resources, and often they also questioned the segmentations and the taxpayers that were based on these selected for inspection. This led to a lowered job satisfaction as the tax inspectors declared a high degree of professional pride in their work and, in general, wanted to do their job well. Furthermore, a consequence of these strategic changes was that tax inspectors experienced that tax authority managers did not acknowledge these problems, but treated the new strategy as a ‘religion’ to follow without questions. This led to a situation where two very different perceptions of reality existed. One represented by the tax inspectors in the operational core, which was deeply sceptical about the new strategic direction. And one at the strategic apex that was in favour of how the organisation now worked.

Looking at this critical case of important changes within tax administration, I draw mainly on Graeber’s work to argue that tax inspectors in fact operated in a dead zone devoid of meaning and saturated with power. They had difficulties making sense of the new work, its priorities, and new tasks. In addition, I have shown that I also became involved in these challenging relations as I critically questioned the new strategic direction of the tax authority and felt the immediate harsh reaction of the tax authority to my interpretation.

This chapter forwards discussions in the anthropology of tax (Björklund & Boll 2021; Makovicky & Smith 2020; Sheild Johansson 2020), as it provides in-depth qualitative analysis of taxation practices in which the social, relational, and interactional aspects of how revenue collection happens are centre stage. The chapter explores a core area for the anthropology of tax – that of changing strategies in tax administration and the effects this has on the tax inspectors’ daily work. Moreover, in relation to the anthropology of tax, the chapter portraits one of the key institutions responsible for taxation, namely the tax authority, and the challenges that an organisation of this kind can experience when it tries to reform itself.