It would be taxing beyond measure to list all the institutions and experts around the world who helped me in reporting and writing A Fine Mess. A battalion of economists, academics, reporters, diplomats, tax accountants, tax collectors, and salt-of-the-earth taxpayers generously shared their experience and wisdom to steer an ink-stained reporter through the intricacies of taxes, tariffs, exemptions, exclusions, VAT, FAT, FTT, and so on. I wish I could give all of them a tax credit for their kindness; at least I can give them credit here for their contributions to this book.
Several international organizations and think tanks study the good, the bad, and the ugly of tax systems around the world; a number of them gave me the benefit of their expertise and their multinational surveys. I’m particularly grateful to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Tax Foundation, the Canadian Tax Foundation (in Toronto), the Tax Justice Network (in London), the Grattan Institute (in Melbourne), and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS; in London). The scholars who found time to help me included Aparna Mathur at AEI, Will McBride at the Tax Foundation, Henry Aaron at Brookings, John Daley at Grattan, Larry Chapman at the Canadian Tax Foundation, and Paul Johnson at IFS.
Professor Jay Rosengard’s course on comparative tax policy and administration at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard was a brilliant introduction to the policy issues pondered in this book. Several of the professors in that course became my gurus throughout the research and writing. I’m particularly grateful to Professors Brian Arnold, Richard Bird, and Eric Zolt. Other economists who offered insightful advice along the way included Alan Krueger, Peter Orzag, and Uwe Reinhardt (who was a gold mine of knowledge on a previous book of mine as well).
Executives at the revenue bureaus of many countries were kind enough to explain the art and science of tax collection in a broad variety of political settings. I owe special thanks to Michiel Sweers, the policy chief at the federal tax agency in the Netherlands, and Achilles Sunday Amawhe (the man who gave me the FIRS baseball cap) of the Federal Inland Revenue Service in Nigeria. In addition, John Paul Liddle of Scotland, Nuno Reis of Timor-Leste, José Zorrilla Rostro of Mexico, and David Trony of Angola helped me to understand the fine balancing act of collecting taxes without sparking a revolt among taxpayers. In the United States, the commissioner of internal revenue, John Koskinen (a colleague of mine eons ago when we were both, briefly, lawyers), and the IRS’s indomitable national taxpayer advocate, Nina Olson, gave me advice, information, and encouragement while this book was in the works.
In almost every country I visited, smart foreign service officers at U.S. embassies provided precious insights into local politics and policy; I was repeatedly impressed by the breadth of knowledge shown by the (generally young) political and commercial officers at our embassies. I would particularly like to thank Steve Butler, Colin Crosby, Mal Murray, Robert King, and Brett Baeker for their help. Because of our country’s deplorable tradition of rewarding fat-cat political contributors by making them ambassadors, U.S. ambassadors around the world are often far less qualified than the career foreign service officers who work under them. In reporting this book, though, I received thoughtful help from some American ambassadors who knew what they were doing—notably Philip Lader in London, Walter F. Mondale in Tokyo, and Norman Eisen in Prague. I was particularly impressed with Theodore (Tod) Sedgwick, our country’s much-esteemed ambassador to Slovakia, who seemed to know every person and every policy issue in that nation’s government. With some trepidation, I asked Ambassador Sedgwick if he might possibly help me get an interview with Slovakia’s finance minister, Peter Kažimír. The ambassador replied, “I play tennis with Peter every week, so I think that can be arranged.”
Political reporters, with their inbred blend of cynicism and idealism, are also insightful observers of government policies and policymakers; many of my fellow reporters helped me in my study of tax systems around the globe. I would particularly like to thank Tom Allard, Fleur Anderson, Adi Bloom, Phil Coorey, Malcolm Farr, Anna Fifield, Jon Freedland, and Tony Wright. A great reporter and a great friend of mine, Togo Shigehiko, showed me precisely how Japan manages to collect trillions in taxes in a system where 85% of the workers never file a tax return. I relied on the reporting of my former colleagues Alan Murray and Jeffrey Birnbaum in Showdown at Gucci Gulch, the definitive chronicle of America’s 1986 tax reform, and on the work of my former competitor Steve Weisman in The Great Tax Wars, his fascinating history of the U.S. income tax.
And in each country where I did the reporting for this book, I was lucky to find economists, accountants, and officials who were willing to answer a nondepreciating list of questions from an inquiring American. It would double the length of this book to list them all. In addition to those named above, though, I am particularly grateful to Steven Rogers and Professors Graeme Cooper, Michael Walpole, and Bill Butcher in Australia; John Christiansen and Professor Judith Freeman in Britain; Larry Chapman and Professor Glenn Jenkins in Canada; Rahim Bohacek and Petr Guth in Czechia; Juri Kalda, Mart Larr, and Professor Viktor Forsberg in Estonia; Antoine Reillac, Guy Carrez, and Professor Martin Collett in France; Ridha Hamzaoui in the Netherlands; Maurice McTigue, Sir Graham Scott, and Professors Bob Buckle and Norman Gemmell in New Zealand; and Peter Kažimír, Ivan Mikloš, Ludovic Ódor, Ján Oravec, and Vladimir Vano in Slovakia.
It must be said that these people don’t always agree with one another on particular aspects of tax policy, and they don’t always agree with me. So any mistakes in this book are my fault, not theirs.
Even in our intensely digital age, libraries serve as immensely useful vaults of information and analysis. I’m grateful to many libraries, public and academic, that allowed me access to their materials on taxation around the world. Those I used the most were the Kennedy School and Widener libraries at Harvard, the Firestone and Stokes libraries at Princeton, the Dewey Library at MIT, the Anderson Academic Commons at the University of Denver, the Auraria Library at the University of Colorado, the law library at the University of New South Wales, the wonderful Westminster Research Library on St. Martin’s Street in London, and the Denver Public Library. I’m deeply grateful to researchers at several of these institutions who found all the obscure books and studies I requested. At one point I needed a particular volume on tax reform in New Zealand; in the entire United States there was a single copy—and the research desk at the University of Denver library managed to borrow it for me.
I hit the jackpot on this project when I hired a brilliant and diligent researcher, Chris Steele, who teaches history at Regis University in Denver. At the start of this project, Chris barely knew the difference between an excise tax and an import duty; by the end, he was teaching me about the intricacies of national tax regimes.
I’m grateful to many friends who tolerated years of questions and complaints from me and provided valuable advice at various stages of the project. These cherished kibitzers include Bill Bradley, Jay Brown, Ricki Hadow, Marc Hecht, Ted Hoster, Bert Kerstetter, Walter Isaacson, Wendy Liu, Sachiko Nakahira, Joe Ptacek, Ann Saybolt, Ed Stein, Kirsten Thistle (who wanted to title this book The 32-Year Itch), and Yoshida Makiko.
As she has done before, the genius literary agent Gail Ross figured out what this book was about before the author did, and kept me on course over the years. As she has done before, the genius editor Ann Godoff shaped a rather chaotic manuscript into a coherent volume. Casey Rasch of Penguin Press skillfully supervised its transformation into a finished book.
Last but foremost, McMahon Thomas Homer Reid, O’Gorman Catherine Penelope Reid, and Erin Andromache Wilhelmina Reid put up with the author and the manuscript in good spirits for years—a task far more demanding than writing any book.
Denver, Colorado, 2013–2017