Game of tax: Rethinking the relationship between redistribution and reciprocity through a Georgian tax lottery

Abstract

This article addresses a failed tax lottery in the country of Georgia's rapid yet shaky political and economic development. The purpose of a tax lottery is to formalize transactions and increase tax compliance. It aims to motivate consumers in any commercial transaction to ask for a receipt qua lottery ticket and ensure that businesses pay taxes due. Tax lotteries thus have a dual function: more revenue is collected from businesses, and consumers do soft policing work while also having a chance to win. Taxation and gambling are two very different ways of exchanging. Gambling is mostly voluntary, effortless, and playful, whereas taxation is dull government revenue collection. Yet both gambling and taxation are ways to understand any society and its political life through its reciprocal qualities and redistributive effects. Drawing on anthropological research studying taxation and gambling, this article is a Schumpeterian analysis, as it provides an inlet into how Georgians regard their society. Studying this tax lottery provides an opportunity to rethink the relation between redistribution and reciprocity, and I argue that to understand how citizens accept the redistribution of taxation, we have to attend to its reciprocal qualities.