Taxes

Bep domain

In the Bep domain, individuals are rarely taxed in money, and rather taxed in tithes/materials. Villages, localities, and other administrative units pay their taxes in material and corvées. Corvées on individuals are rare; most localities already have people employed in the relevant sector, or can hire workers from elsewhere. Directly imposing corvées disrupts internal economy, and is only done when something's very wrong.

The taxation system is logistics-heavy and averse to generic tokens like money. This is due to general distrust of authority, mitigated by paying the tax collector concrete resources rather than currency used for anything. The Bep's most statelike organ is still only a pseudo-state, specifically because local councils can and do bully their higher-ups like this.

Historical context

Bep society retained much structure from its time as a vassal when the Big Evil Empire went cold turkey. This included enforcement offices, many of which took it upon themselves to enforce whatever they wanted. Different offices began claiming responsibility for overlapping areas, leading to frequent petty conflict and skirmishing.

Originally, enforcement offices presided over local councils in a clear, if corrupt, structure. Once the offices could roam freely, many local councils began growing tired of the hordes of officials playing James Bond and extorting them for services often not even provided. Back in the Empire, 1-2 offices would report to a given locality about pipelines, fire prevention, postal infrastructure, etc; after the fall, localities regularly had up to a dozen offices pestering them with dubious invoices and non-extant services.

The balance of power soon shifted towards local councils, which began banding together to sort out their own services. Some built their infrastructure from the ground up, others seized assets from offices by coërcion or force. Although most offices were easy pickings, some larger syndicates survived as independent entities because they were useful and effective enough not to piss people off. These usually ran as hybrid crime syndicates & utility services. Some smaller enforcement offices have also survived until today by not playing mafioso and simply providing utilities as they always did.

Until ~200 years after most of the office skirmishes (~300y post-Empire), nobody tried reuniting the Bep cultural domain into a coherent unit like it was during the Empire. The area's status as vassal was and is the closest it's even been to a proper "state" or "country" in the real-world sense.

During the period of complete dis-unification, the syndicates held very little power. They could get away with trafficking & extortion, but their main source of influence was still the providing of utilities and basic services; an arena where bands of localities could easily replace them at any time, rendering them effectively bankrupt. A thoroughly disenfranchised syndicate might survive in name, but be functionally dead, transformed into a much less influential local mafia or criminal gang.

However, the syndicates held one benefit, namely that of scale.

The wide reach of many syndicates' utilities allowed them to begin acting as mediators between localities with gradually increasing scope. Initially, only some basic business was conducted through syndicates, but by ~600y post-Empire, law coördination, tariffs, and resource exchanges would become commonly managed via syndicates. To this day, many trade routes and many smaller administrations' legations are run mostly by contracted syndicates. As the usefulness of syndicates grew, most began focusing on societal matters more generally, and many were merged as the administrations around them saw fit. This effectively formed the beginnings of a semi-unitary governmental body; a sort of confederation where coördinating the different subjects mostly fell on a terrified but efficient corps of former mail-mongers and druglords.

Most of current Bep administrative structure is still lined with syndicates, although increasing public accountability forced most of their business & extortion elements to formally separate or shut down. Feuds between syndicates are still frequent even after they've become incorporated into governing bodies, particularly between those involved in governance and their former chapters or less successful syndicates bitter about not getting to run the show.

How you might be taxed

How the individual is taxed depends on where they are, usually run by a council that'll have some sort of internal economy set up. usually people pay in money or resources/tithes, depending on the area's internal economy. there's also a sort of paid corvée to ensure the function of a given industry by mandating people work in it, typical of more isolated communities (esp. mining settlements), but in most places it exists as an emergency measure only or not at all.

many localities require a general everything fee, typically to cover the services/utilities the locality provides for you, although not all utilities will be covered. water, for instance, tends to be something the individual has to subscribe to separately, meaning the "water borders" between water providers differ dramatically from more general administrative borders. if you happen to produce it, this fee is paid in a resource that the locality uses to pay the bills andor maintain the services it runs itself.

while land ownership isn't really quite a thing, *land use taxes* are also a prevalent feature of the individual economy. tithes aren't unheard of, but the decidedly most common form of land use regulation is a requirement for you to keep so and so much of your produce within the local economy. this tax is often more flexible in *what* resource you can pay with than the services fee, and thus it's more often paid in stuff.

money acts as a "backup" both with service fees and land use fees, used when you can't pay in something more directly useful. it's quite common for cooperatives/companies to do the shared land use taxes for everyone, and for individuals to hire acquisitions services to procure their tax resource for them with their money. especially in more impersonal, denser communities, paying money tax directly costs wayy more than the equivalent resource tax, so it helps to have a mediator sort your tax out for you. a rural person can acquire their tax yams themselves, but an urbanite in an industrial centre will usually need someone else to procure steel pipe for them.

the bep also view a local administration paying you for a certain land use or labour as a "reverse tax", meaning you're not only tax exempt but *anti-taxed* if you're working for the community, at the cost of probably not having much income from anything else.

more broadly, localities usually pay *their* bills in resources or corvées. a corvée imposed on a locality does not mean the locality will impose a corvée on its population, it just means the locality needs to ensure workers for something, either from its own labour pool or by hiring in from elsewhere. money is not typically used for transactions between administrative entities; this is a mechanism to ensure the recipient entity cannot take the money and run too easily.

more remote areas may simply not have any tax because there's no administration and no services to pay for, or have "tax" on a very small and informal scale where the five people living together in the woods try to keep things going. despite this, "tax havens" don't really happen, because if you drag enough workers out into the boonies to start an industry in "tax free land", they'll more than likely start taxing both you and themselves.