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

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.