Citizen Tax Juries: Democratizing Tax Enforcement After the Panama Papers

Three years after the Panama Papers scandal, tax avoidance remains an urgent normative problem. Moving beyond both the academic and policy mainstream, I advocate the “democratization of tax enforcement,” by which I mean systematic efforts to make tax avoiders accountable to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Both individual oligarchs and multinational corporations have access to elite tax avoidance strategies that impose significant fiscal costs and which exacerbate preexisting distributive and political inequalities. Yet much contemporary sheltering occurs within the letter of the law, rendering criminal sanctions ineffective. Moreover, existing enforcement strategies are vulnerable to regulatory and legislative capture. In response, I argue for the creation of Citizen Tax Juries, deliberative mini-publics empowered to scrutinize tax avoiders, demand justification, and facilitate concrete reforms. This proposal thus responds to the wider aspiration, within contemporary democratic theory, to secure more popular control over important economic processes.