Shady car dealings and taxing work practices: An ethnography of a tax audit process

Karen Boll

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2014, vol. 39, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: The empirical focus of this article is a ten-month ethnography of a tax audit process led by the Danish Tax and Customs Administration. The tax audit concerns a number of shady car dealings from which taxable income is not reported. This article focuses on the process whereby the tax administration succeeds in making some of these car dealings visible. This article draws inspiration from interpretative tax studies that consider taxation as an organisational, institutional, social and cultural phenomenon. Complementing those studies’ approaches, the present study draws both on Latour’s concept of the oligopticon and on Foucault’s notion of the panopticon. The analysis shows that tax inspectors produce oligoptic and panoptic visions when they account for taxpayers’ economic activities and that tax inspectors’ visions are received differently by the represented taxpayers. Some taxpayers fall out of sight, whereas others are highly visible and are interrogated in detail. Using the concepts of the oligopticon and the panopticon to analyse the tax audit process is significant for interpretative tax and accounting studies, because this theoretical approach represents an original method of conceptualising taxation in practice and the work implied in tax administration. Furthermore, due to its detailed ethnography of the tax audit process, this study makes a significant methodological contribution.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368213001001
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:39:y:2014:i:1:p:1-19

DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2013.12.004

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().