SVART ARBETE, VITT ARBETE: Hur lite skit i hörnen blev ett rent helvete

The article discusses a case which made the headlines of Swedish newspapers in the spring of 2003. A group of suburban women was caught using an immigrant woman without work permit to clean their homes. The indictments read “crimes against the aliens act”, but the debate focused on svart arbete, literally translated as black market work or moonlighting. Both svart arbete and paid home-cleaning contribute to an infected debate with political undertones in Swedish society. The article makes an analysis of the women’s justifications and explanations of their use of domestic cleaning services in the context of changes currently underway in Swedish society. The welfare state and its institutions are adapting to EU-membership and an enlarged labour market. Individual actors, both providers and buyers, respond to these market possibilities in different ways. Ethical and economic considerations are examined vis-à-vis these women’s own employment, and in regard to perceived earning possibilities for the foreign cleaning woman. Different conceptions of formal and informal work in the domestic sphere are discussed. &nbsp

Comparisons and Recommendations

For the last decade a major trend within tax administrations has been to shift from a roughly one size fits all approach—where close to all taxpayers experience a deterrence approach—to a more responsive and collaborative approach as in co-operative compliance programmes. Such programmes build on the idea that the participating corporations disclose relevant information including their tax risks and are transparent to the tax administrations and in return will tax administrations provide real-time predictability and clarity concerning taxation issues of relevance for the corporation. In brief, co-operative compliance builds on the slogan: “…certainty in exchange for transparency” (OECD 2016, 7). Co-operative compliance has increasingly become a core concern and way of organizing the relation between tax authorities and large corporate tax payers when it comes to securing tax compliance. This working paper is the result of research by Work Package 6 in EU’s Horizon 2020 funded programme FairTax that has been running for the four-year period 2015-2019. Our research in Work Package 6 addresses how proactive engagements with large corporate taxpayers have affected regulation of tax collection and administrative processes, changed relationships between stakeholders and tax administrations, and influenced tax compliance in the Nordic countries. The aim of this working paper is to provide a comparison of the experiences in four of the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and to propose recommendations. The Nordic countries are considered similar and so were the co-operative compliance programmes that were implemented in each country, yet the outcomes were very different. We thus dealt with various case characteristics (Flyvbjerg 2006) where the outcomes hinged on a complexity of elements. We argue that the Swedish case is an extreme case due to its turbulent life and concomitantly with only a handful of participants that have very little activity. The Norwegian case, in contrast, is an example of a maximum variation case because of the much longer history of collaborative relationships and the outcome of the work with tax risk. The combination of a collaborative way of working and systematic risk management and monitoring may either reflect a most likely scenario of future tax administration—or perhaps the least likely. Lastly, we argue that the Danish and Finnish cases represent paradigmatic cases because both of these align largely with the standards set by the OECD and because they therefore present more ordinary or regular ways of working with co-operative compliance. Analyzing a wide variety of case characteristics means that our findings can be of general interest, beyond the Nordic countries

SWEDEN: Failure of a Cooperative Compliance Project?

This report outlines the Swedish  cooperative  compliance  project Fördjupad  samverkan  - FS (enhanced collaboration) introduced in 2011 and the modified initiative relaunched as Fördjupad dialog – FD (enhanced dialogue) in 2014. It describes how the Swedish Tax Agency proposed an initiative that carried with it international success stories from similar projects, but in the Swedish version and context met with strong resistance and is now put on hold awaiting proposed changes in the law. This chronological trajectory teases out issues that impact tax compliance among large corporations and perhaps also among ordinary taxpayers in Swedish society. Based on these issues, I suggest eight aspects that have to be paid attention to when implementing cooperative compliance initiatives. These aspects seldom stand alone but are drawn upon in various combinations making criticism possible.FairTa

Moulding Knowledge into a Legal Complex : Para-ethnography at the Swedish Tax Agency

The foundation of a functioning welfare state is a tax system that is widely accepted and considered to be fair and legitimate. How and by what means a tax collecting agency interprets the laws are thus seen to have an impact on taxpayers’ willingness to pay. This article addresses the various practices, knowledge and forms of data that the Swedish Tax Agency applies in a risk assessment project, against a background of the Agency’s on-going endeavour for legitimacy. This article shows how its methods not only entail taking account of massive amounts of Tax Agency regulations, research, and statistical results to follow, but also reveals how stories, hunches and examples from media and everyday life coalesce to affect those methods. So, too, with the ethnographer’s role: how is she to deal with knowledge production within a governmental organization whose employees read, and also learn from, what she writes.Swedish Tax Dynamics. Values and Practices at The Swedish Tax Agency and The Economization of Societ

Buy or barter? Illegal yet licit purchases of work in contemporary Sweden

This article explores the tensions between buying and bartering a ser vice in contemporary Sweden by analyzing the acceptable purchase of svart arbete —informal exchanges of work. It is a commonplace phenomenon, but also widely debated, as it is seen as detrimental to welfare society, eroding taxpaying morals and solidarity with fellow citizens. Settling the svart deal with money makes the links to market and state domains more pertinent. Even cash-settled deals are therefore often referred to as barters to create a reverse disentanglement, away from the formal market and moved closer to the realm of social exchanges. The informants express a verbal creativity in a joking manner. Exploring synonyms and metaphors reveals the informality, but the talk also shows that, as exchanges, they are part of everyday life. The article thus describes how illegal yet licit exchanges of work are articulated.Att organisera marknade

Illegal yet Licit : Justifying Informal Purchases of Work in Contemporary Sweden

Svart arbete, informal purchases of work, is a widely debated societal phenomenon in Sweden. It is often seen as detrimental to contemporary welfare society, eroding taxpaying morals, fair competition and solidarity with fellow citizens. Acknowledged as wrong, it is in many instances also an acceptable and commonplace exchange practice. This study addresses this incongruity and aims to show how these inconspicuous exchanges of work are distinguished in terms of legality and licitness. Methodologically, the study is based on ethnographic interviews with a group of people in all walks of life, who have their roots in a small town in southern Sweden. In the midst of life and work, they address situations where living in accordance with moral standards becomes difficult. The study aims to illuminate multifaceted reasonings about the illegal but licit purchases made and how people make sense and meaning of them in retrospect and in the larger context of societal economy. The ways in which these purchases of svart arbete are justified illustrate inherent tensions in contemporary welfare society. Purchases of svart arbete are often justified as rational economic decisions in terms of being cheap and simple. The study shows that purchasing work informally is not only a rational economic decision, but can also be the result of resolving necessities in daily life due to societal bottlenecks and/or probing tax legislation. As an economic phenomenon, these purchases are therefore not seen as set apart from the formal structures of the Swedish economy, but as co-existing with them. Justifying the illegal but licit svart arbete, purchasers are seen to emphasise a reciprocal relationship with the provider of the work and also with the state. In this way, a sense of balance and justice is achieved

Mind the (tax) gap : an ethnography of a number

This article looks carefully at the making of the tax gap as a calculative practice at the Swedish Tax Agency. It points to the challenges with assessing tax gap numbers and reveals examples of its careless usage by various stakeholders in Swedish society in order to impact the discourse on tax compliance. Based on an ethnographic study of documents, it is an example of a number that performs a dual function: on the one hand mobilizing peopleâ\u80\u99s morals and subsequent commitments and on the other hand measuring such commitments. On a more general level, the tax gap is an example of how a number that describes a complicated reality is calculated with many caveats attached to it, yet used with certainty in society. I thus challenge the metaphor of the ubiquitous â\u80\u98black boxâ\u80\u99. The Swedish tax gap number is a calculated device and can be unpacked as a specific number. But if we think about what a tax gap ought to contain, we have to think outside the box and beyond: what was not included in the published tax gap number and why there was no room for it.FairTax 649439. European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 2014-2018

A Fair Share of Tax

Tax compliance; Reciprocity; Ethnography; Economic anthropology; Welfare; Exchanges; Taxpayer; Marcel Mauss; Swedish Tax Agency; quid-pro-quo exchange; Fiscal anthropology; Swedish tax; Behavioural economics; Economic exchanges and reciprocity; Tax as a gift; Public economics; Progressive marginal tax; Contributive and distributive balancin

The making of a ‘good deal’ : dealing with conflicting and complementary values when getting the car repaired informally in Sweden

Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent exchanges in Swedish society, and there are many reasons for performing them. On the one hand, a good deal is part of everyday social life when people help each other. On the other hand, a good deal also reinforces views that economic rationalities are values that do not exclusively adhere to formal markets. This article focuses on the values that construct the ‘good deal’ when getting your car fixed informally. These overlapping and somewhat contradictory values in theory, but commonplace in practice, illustrate how notions of reciprocity and economic calculations interweave and are difficult to entangle one from the other. The ‘good deal’ thus concerns how illegal, yet licit purchases of services are made acceptable when posing them as cheap and simple transactions that simultaneously invoke a realm of closer relations.Published online August 22, 2013</p