Fiscal Belonging

This open access book addresses critical questions surrounding attitudes to tax and tax compliance through the lens of ‘fiscal belonging’, demonstrating the value of qualitative approaches to tax research. It explores the lived experience of immigrants to the UK and how a sense of societal belonging can inform our understanding of taxation and the potential implications for tax policy. Key tax concerns including reciprocity, compliance and administration are all discussed.

The book illuminates the many different facets of fiscal belonging, including the right to work and access to employment, as well as histories of colonialism and the economic history of certain communities on a national scale. By privileging a nuanced and inclusive approach rooted in individuals’ experience, the book makes an argument for more methodologically diverse understandings of why and how people pay (or don’t pay) tax.

Lotta Björklund Larsen holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Stockholm University and is currently co-investigator in the ESRC funded research project Fiscal Citizenship. Her research on taxation is broadly based in economic, legal, and moral anthropology. “Why we pay tax, why we avoid doing so and how we are made to pay tax” are questions that bring to fore people’s relation to state, community and fellow citizens. Through her ethnographic research she has examined epistemologies that shapes tax compliance, engaging with tax authorities, corporate and private taxpayers, as well as tax avoiders.

Lynne Oats is Emeritus Professor of Taxation, University of Exeter and has been teaching and researching taxation in Australia and the UK since 1988, most recently as principal investigator of the ESRC funded Fiscal Citizenship project. Her research interests focus on taxation as a social and institutional practice, embracing historical and contemporary tax policy both nationally and internationally. Lynne draws on insights from sociology, law and politics in her research and is motivated by curiosity about all things tax related, from eighteenth century newspaper stamp duty to the current taxation of multinationals and everything in between.