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

Tuck, Penelope; Lamb, Margaret; Hoskin, Keith

doi:10.1080/00014788.2011.566015

Cited by 8 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The theory of responsive regulation is used by some contemporary regulatory scholars to make sense of how customer focus is integrated with the use of coercion and punitive sanctions to achieve compliance (Alford & Speed, 2006;Tuck et al, 2011). For this reason, I will take a moment to outline the theory in detail.…”

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This shift occurred during the 1980s and 90s, the period when NPM dominated government thinking and debate about the reform of public services. Not surprisingly, then, compliance-focused approaches to regulation mirror many of the principles and orientations advanced in the discourses of NPM (Aberbach & Christensen, 2007;Tuck et al, 2011). This includes a focus on 'results', 'mission accomplishment' and 'effectiveness', which in the regulatory context translate to a concern with overall levels of compliance rather than the number of breaches that a regulator has enforced (Sparrow, 2000, p. 56).…”

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The deployment of customer focus policies to promote voluntary compliance is illustrated, for example, in studies of the compliance practices of tax agencies in the UK (Tuck, 2013;Tuck et al, 2011), the USA and Norway (Aberbach & Christensen, 2007) and Australia (Alford, 1998). Here, customer focus policies encourage the use of what Tuck (2013) calls 'enabling' techniques that are designed to persuade and facilitate individual and corporate taxpayers to pay the correct amount of tax.…”

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Regulatory scholars have used the theory of responsive regulation to analyse both the benefits and the dangers of applying customer focus in the regulatory context (Alford & Speed, 2006;Tuck et al, 2011). In doing this, they associate customer focus exclusively with the lower rungs of the pyramid that prescribe enabling techniques with the aim of soliciting voluntary compliance (e.g.…”

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For over two decades, the customer concept has been employed in a variety of such services, including the police (Clarke et al, 2007;Loader, 1999;Needham, 2009), tax agencies (Aberbach & Christensen, 2007;Tuck, 2013;Tuck, Lamb, & Hoskin, 2011), and criminal justice 'services' like prisons, probation and parole (Crook & Wood, 2014;Donohue & Moore, 2009;McCulloch & McNeill, 2007;Vardon, 1997;Weller, 1997). The reason that being treated like a customer in these contexts continues to feel unnatural, despite the fact that it is no longer a novel phenomenon, goes to the distinctive nature of these organisations, their objectives and the way in which they pursue them.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

Clarke¹

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The drive to instil 'customer focus' in government services has always been controversial. However, it is particularly controversial when adopted in services that have compliance functions, such as regulatory bodies, the police and some welfare agencies. The reason for this is that, whereas customer focus discourse prescribes that public services tailor their offerings to the preferences of individual service users, compliance-oriented services produce public goods (order, safety, etc.) by compelling individuals to do/stop doing certain things regardless of their preferences. There is, therefore, a prima facie tension between customer focus discourse and the objectives and practices of compliance, and this raises important questions about why and how customer focus is adopted in compliance-oriented services, and what the consequences of this are.This thesis addresses these questions by investigating the adoption of customer focus policies in the compliance branch of an Australian city council. It is informed by a conceptual framework derived from the governmentality studies literature, where numerous theoretical resources exist for examining how styles of thinking, such as customer focus, shape, and are shaped by, practices for governing the conduct of political subjects. In particular, I draw on the theoretical and methodological insights of a number of recent governmentality studies that examine governing at the level of situated practices as well as, or instead of, at the level of widespread discourses or political rationalities. The rationale for attending to situated practices is to grasp how discourses like customer focus are mobilised by situated actors to address problems emerging in particular governmental contexts, such as urban governance.It is also to facilitate analysis of how heterogeneous discourses and practices, such as customer focus and compliance, are assembled together and how tensions between them are managed on the ground.The thesis presents data collected through ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted with the compliance branch of the city council mentioned above. An ethnographic approach was adopted because it best aligned with my theoretical orientation to study governing at the level of situated practices. Adopting an ethnographic approach allowed me to observe firsthand how customer focus discourse is integrated with compliance practices in the day-to-day operations of urban governance.It also allowed me to overcome some of the limitations associated with the reliance on textual analysis of archival materials in governmentality studies, such as the tendency to infer the operation and effects of governing practices from how they are represented in programmatic texts.Previous research has foregrounded the tensions that arise when customer focus is adopted in compliance-oriented public services and has warned that these tensions risk undermining the public interest outcomes that compliance services produce. The findings presented in this thesis contributes to this literature by...

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Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tensions Between Customer Focus and Coercive Compliance Pracmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

Clarke¹

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Implementing problematic tax regulation: Hysteresis and bureaucratic revolutionaries within tax administrations

Ormeño-Pérez

Oats

2023

The British Accounting Review

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Bringing the Law Back In: The Law-Government Nexus in an Era of Network Governance

Zouridis

Leijtens

2020

Perspectives on Public Management and Governance

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Recently, scholars have claimed that public management theory has too much ignored law. Consequently, the under-legalized conception of public management has produced a flawed understanding of public management theory as well as public management practices, threatening public institutions’ legitimacy. In this article, we argue that law never left public management theory. Rather, the link between government and law has been redefined twice. We refer to the assumptions that constitute this link as the law-government nexus. This nexus changed from lawfulness in a public administration paradigm, to legal instrumentalism in a (new) public management paradigm, and to a networked concept in the public governance (PG) paradigm. In order to prevent a faulty over-legalized conception of public management, bringing the law back in should be built on lessons from the past. This article elaborates on three strategies to reconnect law and public management. We map the strengths and weaknesses of each law-government nexus and illustrate these with the case of the Dutch tax agency. In our strategies that aim to reconceptualize the current law-government nexus, we incorporate the benefits of each paradigm for public management theory. The revised law-governance nexus enables the PG paradigm to correspond to contemporary issues without encountering old pathologies.

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

Cited by 8 publications

References 17 publications

Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

Governing customers? Integrating customer focus and compliance in the urban governance context

Implementing problematic tax regulation: Hysteresis and bureaucratic revolutionaries within tax administrations

Bringing the Law Back In: The Law-Government Nexus in an Era of Network Governance

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