Suchergebnisse

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

The foundation of a functioning welfare state is a tax system that is widely accepted and considered to be fair and legitimate. How and by what means a tax collecting agency interprets the laws are thus seen to have an impact on taxpayers' willingness to pay. This article addresses the various practices, knowledge and forms of data that the Swedish Tax Agency applies in a risk assessment project, against a background of the Agency's on-going endeavour for legitimacy. This article shows how its methods not only entail taking account of massive amounts of Tax Agency regulations, research, and statistical results to follow, but also reveals how stories, hunches and examples from media and everyday life coalesce to affect those methods. So, too, with the ethnographer's role: how is she to deal with knowledge production within a governmental organization whose employees read, and also learn from, what she writes.

Algorithms are increasingly affecting us in our daily lives. They seem to be everywhere, yet they are seldom seen by the humans dealing with the consequences that result from them. Yet, in recent theorisations, there is a risk that the algorithm is being given too much prominence. This article addresses the interaction between algorithmic outputs and the humans engaging with them by drawing on studies of two distinct empirical fields – self-quantification and audit controls of taxpayers. We explore recalibration as a way to understand the practices and processes involved when, on the one hand, decisions are made based on results from algorithmic calculations in counting and accounting software, and on the other hand, when decisions are made based on human experience/knowledge. In particular, we are concerned with moments when an algorithmic output differs from expectations of 'normalcy' and 'normativity' in any given situation. This could be a 'normal' relation between sales and VAT deductions for a business, or a 'normal' number of steps one takes in a day, or 'normative' as it is according to the book, following guidelines and recommendations from other sources. In these moments, we argue that a process of recalibration occurs – an effortful moment where, rather than treat the algorithmic output as given, individuals' tacit knowledge, experiences and intuition are brought into play to address the deviation from the normal and normative.