Shaping Taxpayers

How do you make taxpayers comply? This ethnography is a vivid account of one of the most esteemed Swedish bureaucracies - the Swedish Tax Agency. Shaping Taxpayers focuses on how fiscal strategies and relationships, as well as diverse knowledge claims - legal, economic, cultural - compete to shape taxpayer behaviour.

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How do you make taxpayers comply? This ethnography offers a vivid, yet nuanced account of knowledge making at one of Sweden’s most esteemed bureaucracies – the Swedish Tax Agency. In its aim to collect taxes and minimize tax faults, the Agency mediates the application of tax law to ensure compliance and maintain legitimacy in society. This volume follows one risk assessment project’s passage through the Agency, from its inception, through the research phase, in discussions with management to its final abandonment. With its fiscal anthropological approach, Shaping Taxpayers reveals how diverse knowledge claims – legal, economic, cultural – compete to shape taxpayer behaviour.