Nothing official: Taxation without recognition

This series is for those who read “Do You Pay Your Taxes?” and asked what comes next.

The voices in that piece were direct:

Where does our money go?

Who does the system work for?

Who pays the price when it doesn’t?

This series answers those questions—one layer at a time.

Each article examines a different dimension of tax justice through a feminist political economy lens. Together, they map a system designed by the powerful, for the powerful—and what it will take to change it.

Some examples repeat across pieces. This is deliberate. Mechanisms like presumptive tax, the taxation of necessities, the unpaid care economy, and the invisibility of informal workers are structural. Each return reveals another layer of how the system works..

This series focuses on women—not because they are the only ones excluded, but because their exclusion exposes the system most clearly. Women are not a single story. The market trader, the rural farmer, the woman with a disability each faces different constraints. A later piece examines these differences. Here, we begin where the pattern is sharpest: with the women whose daily contributions leave no trace.

She has receipts in a plastic bag

She has sold in the market for fifteen years.

Every morning she pays a market fee. Every week she pays for garbage collection. When she needs the toilet, she pays for that too. She pays presumptive tax on her business and VAT on everything she buys.

She keeps her receipts in a plastic bag under her stall. Fifteen years of payments. Fifteen years of contribution. The bag is thick with paper.

When she needs a loan to expand her business, the bank asks for three years of tax returns.

She brings the bag.

The loan is denied.

What the system records

For the formal taxpayer, every payment leaves a trace.

A Tax Identification Number follows you through the system. You need it to open a bank account, to file returns, to prove you exist. Your payments are recorded. Your history accumulates. When you need a loan, you have proof. When you reach old age, you have a pension record. The system knows you.

This is the paper trail of recognition.

What it erases

For the woman in the market, there is no trail that counts.

Market fees are paid in cash. Sometimes a receipt is issued—a slip with an amount, a date, a stamp. No name. No identifier. No link to her.

Market fees are paid in cash. Sometimes a receipt is given—a slip of paper with an amount, a date, a stamp that could belong to anyone. No name. No identifier.

Garbage fees, toilet fees, daily levies—the money is recorded as revenue. It is not recorded as hers.

They are treated as fees. They function as taxes.

Money leaves her hands and enters the public purse. The system depends on it. But when taxpayers are counted, she is not there.

She pays.

She is not recognised.

The taxpayer who doesn’t count

She pays to enter the market, to keep her stall, to use the toilet, to access water, to dispose of waste—for the right to operate in a space the state regulates but does not recognise her within.

She pays every day.

But when the state counts taxpayers, she disappears.

Tax systems are built around a narrow figure: the registered, documented, return-filing individual. Everyone else is treated as peripheral—informal, exempt, outside.

This is false.

The market trader, the small-scale farmer, the informal worker are not outside the tax system. They are embedded within it—paying constantly, predictably, and often at higher effective rates.

They do not count.

Taxation without recognition

What do we call it when people pay, but are not recognised as payers?

Market levies. Garbage fees. Water user charges. Toilet fees. Daily permits. Transport-related charges. These are not optional. They are enforced. They are collected—sometimes formally, often informally, with or without receipts.

They are taxes in all but name.

Yet they sit outside official tax narratives. They are not aggregated into national tax statistics. They are not attributed to individuals. They do not build a taxpayer record. They do not confer status, access, or rights.

They extract—but they do not recognise.

The invisible weight of consumption taxes

Then there is VAT.

Paid on almost everything. Paid daily. Paid by everyone—regardless of income, registration status, or formal employment.

Receipts show it. The numbers are there. The contribution is real. But it is never recorded as her tax contribution. It is absorbed into the system without a name attached.

She pays tax every day—and remains officially invisible as a taxpayer.

Exempt from filing, excluded from claiming

This is the core contradiction.

She is required to pay, but not enabled to claim.

Exemption from filing does not remove obligation. It removes recognition. Without filing, there is no record. Without a record, there is no proof. Without proof, there is no access.

No rebates. No reliefs. No leverage.

And yet formal proof is required everywhere: to access credit, to enter value chains, to qualify for programmes—even in sectors where informal actors dominate.

She is taxed.

She cannot prove it.

The TIN that opens no doors

A Tax Identification Number is presented as the solution, a marker of economic identity.

In practice, it does not function that way.

For most small-scale traders, a TIN is procedural. It is used to obtain a licence. It appears on forms. It rarely translates into access, benefits, or recognition.

It sits on a on a piece of paper—often in the same plastic bag as the receipts.

When recognition matters—a loan from her savings group, a voice in how market fees are spent—the TIN is silent., it carries no weight.

Compliance without return.

Recognition without consequence. 

What counts as proof?

The bank officer is polite. He asks for three years of tax returns.

She explains that she pays market fees, presumptive tax, VAT. She has receipts. She shows him the plastic bag.

He shakes his head. “This is not official,” he says. “We need proof of income.”

She has fifteen years of proof.

The system does not fail to see the evidence. It refuses to recognise it.

The loan is denied.

Her mobile money records show steady income. Her savings group demonstrates reliability and credit discipline. Both are dismissed.

A system designed to extract

This is not an administrative failure.

It is a structural design choice.

The system captures revenue at the edges—through fees, levies, and consumption taxes—because it is efficient to collect from those with the least power to resist. But it withholds recognition, because recognition would create claims: on resources, on redistribution, accountability, and on rights from the state itself.

So the informal taxpayer is highly taxed in practice, minimally recognised in policy, entirely excluded in narrative.

Why this is not neutral

This invisibility is not gender neutral.

Women are overrepresented in informal trade, small-scale agriculture, and low-margin economic activity—precisely where the system extracts most and recognises least.

They absorb daily costs, navigate fragmented systems, and carry the burden of invisibility.

When they are not counted as taxpayers, their contribution is erased. When their contribution is erased, their claim to justice is denied.

What would change if her payments counted?

The system already has the tools to recognise her.

Payments can be linked to identity. Receipts can build a record. Transactions can accumulate into recognised contribution.

After one year, there is a history. After five, a track record. After fifteen, evidence that cannot be dismissed.

That evidence could unlock credit, support social protection, and establish standing in systems that currently exclude her.

The barrier is not technical.

Recognition shifts power.

That is why it is resisted.

Redefining the taxpayer

Tax justice requires a shift in definition.

A taxpayer is not only someone who files. A taxpayer is anyone from whom the state extracts revenue—directly or indirectly, formally or informally.

This includes the market vendor paying daily levies. The informal worker paying VAT on every purchase. The small-scale farmer paying user fees without recognition. The woman whose economic activity is taxed but never recorded.

Counting taxpayers must move beyond registration systems and into lived economic reality.

Count what you collect

Recognition begins with a simple shift: count what you collect.

Treat every payment as a contribution, not just a transaction. Acknowledge sustained payment as tax participation. Build systems that convert daily payments into recognised records. Reform fragmented local revenue systems into accountable structures.

The goal is not to burden women with more paperwork. It is to stop pretending they are outside the system when they are already funding it.

Taxation must confer status, access, and protection – not just obligation. A taxpayer should not have to wait until she can afford a tax advisor to be recognised. She should be recognised because she pays.

It is about ending denial.

The question that remains

She has receipts in a plastic bag—fifteen years of proof.

The system took.

It did not record.

That is not absence. It is design.

Count what you collect.

Recognise who pays.

Redefine the taxpayer.

The next article examines the pace of change—and why even that is not enough.