It’s Not What You Do but the Way that You Do It: Tax Evasion, Tax Avoidance and the Boundaries of Deviance

Abstract

The publication of the official crime rates every year routinely stimulates outcry over the breakdown of law and order. Large-scale white-collar crime has increasingly become front page news. Yet law and order may be undermined just as much, and quite routinely, by activities which are quite immune from any hint — or possibility — of criminal stigma. These activities are committed by people who, far from breaking the law, go to great lengths to ensure they abide by it, yet while abiding by the law they also escape its impact. They are both immune to legal requirements and prohibitions, and immune to any threat of penalty or stigma. This chapter explores this paradox in the context of a study of tax evasion and tax avoidance, and argues that social control through law is challenged not just by those who abuse the law but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, by those who use it.