"Why Should All Taxpayers Be Treated As Criminals" - The Question a Ruling-Party MP Asked His Own Government

The Growth Number Doesn't Say Who Is Paying For It

Direct tax collections up 23.09% year-on-year sounds, at the aggregate level, like unambiguous good news - a widening base, a strengthening economy, a tax administration doing its job well. That number is true on average.

It says nothing about whether the growth is coming from more people entering the tax net and the economy genuinely expanding or from the same compliant taxpayers being squeezed harder through notices, scrutiny and rules that shift under them mid-year.

Macro to

micro: the taxpayer the committee is actually describing The MP's line - "why should all income taxpayers be treated as criminals"

• is not rhetorical excess. It describes a specific, real experience: a salaried professional or small business owner receiving an automated notice, then having to actively prove compliance with rules that may have changed retrospectively since the transaction in question occurred. The burden of proof sits with the taxpayer, not the department and the volume of such notices means this isn't a rare edge case - it's frequent enough that a ruling-party MP raised it unprompted in his own government's oversight committee.

The mechanism:

why "faceless" didn't remove the friction The Faceless Assessment Scheme was designed to reduce direct human contact between taxpayers and officials, cutting opportunities for harassment and corruption. What it did not necessarily reduce is notice volume - an automated or semi-automated system can generate scrutiny notices at a scale no human-staffed system could, without the same accountability for whether each notice reflects genuine risk or simply an algorithmic flag.

For the taxpayer on the receiving end, "faceless" has not meant "fewer demands to prove yourself"

• often the opposite, since there's no longer a specific officer to reason with directly.

Zooming back out:

the structural imbalance the number conceals The committee's second concern - that individual taxpayers now contribute more, relative to corporate tax, than in many comparable economies - reframes the enforcement question entirely.

If personal income tax is growing faster than corporate tax as a share of total collections and much of that personal-tax growth comes via aggressive notice-driven enforcement rather than organic income growth, the 23.09% headline figure may be describing intensified pressure on an existing, compliant, individual taxpayer base more than genuine base expansion.

That is a very different story than the growth number alone suggests and it is precisely the gap a Mains examiner would reward identifying. For the exam, the transferable insight: a rising tax-collection number can result from two very different underlying processes - a widening, healthier base or intensified extraction from an existing one - and only structural data on who is actually paying, not the aggregate figure, can tell you which.