Discussion paper
DP19916 Becoming Legible to the State: The Essential but Incomplete Role of Identification Capacity in Taxation
Many lower income countries know little about their citizens and their tax bases, which hinders effective taxation. This paper studies the impact of making the tax base more “legible” and signaling this legibility to taxpayers. Leveraging a new digitized property database, a randomized experiment in Liberia finds that including identifying information (owners’ names and property photographs) in tax notices quadruples the likelihood of payment from 2 percent to over 8 percent, but only when the notice also details noncompliance penalties. The intervention pays for itself within one year, and its effects persist to the 4th year. These results underscore that both legibility and enforcement are essential for taxation.
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