EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Customers? The reconstruction of the ‘taxpayer’ in Inland Revenue discourse and practice

Penelope Tuck, Margaret Lamb and Keith Hoskin

Accounting and Business Research, 2011, vol. 41, issue 4, 357-374

Abstract: References to ‘customers’ have become commonplace in the policy discourses within UK government and other public sector bodies. It is a working assumption of UK public sector management that the concept of the ‘customer’ can be applied to any public sector service agency or department; and this paper analyses how the UK government's revenue department, formerly titled the Inland Revenue (IR), re-characterised firstly taxpayers and latterly tax claimants as ‘customers’, rather than ‘users’, of IR services. This paper identifies some problems, dilemmas and ambiguities associated with this reconceptualisation in the context of an organisation that is predominantly a regulating department. Far from being merely a reclassification of the taxpayer as customer, the emerging discourse and associated practices of the IR were in part embedded in organisational change, including the merger with HM Customs and Excise to form the present-day HMRC. Thus this case analysis illustrates the limits of consumerism as a strategic tool of a government revenue department and raises wider questions for public management.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00014788.2011.566015 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:acctbr:v:41:y:2011:i:4:p:357-374

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RABR20

DOI: 10.1080/00014788.2011.566015

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting and Business Research is currently edited by Vivien Beattie

More articles in Accounting and Business Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:acctbr:v:41:y:2011:i:4:p:357-374