How do frontline tax workers assess citizen-clients’ trustworthiness? The role of signals and status characteristics

Within the literature on street-level workers’ encounters with citizens it is generally known that bureaucrats’ decision making is partly dependent on the relationship they have with them. Within policy areas that promote notions as trust and responsiveness, bureaucrats’ relationship with citizen-clients becomes even more crucial. Very little is known about what frontline workers deem trustworthy and untrustworthy citizen-clients in the first place, and how they know they have to do with either a trustworthy or untrustworthy citizen-client. The street-level bureaucracy literature suggests that frontline workers rely on universalistic standards of deservingness, but also on particularistic attributes such as ethnicity and socio-economic background to categorize citizen-clients. Such attributes are commonly believed to signal an unobservable characteristic, such as a citizen-client’s general ability. Belonging to a certain social grouping, then, serves as ‘a signal’ that one is, for example, either competent or incompetent. In line with signaling theory (Spence, 1973; Weiss, 1995), existing research thus emphasizes the information problem street-level bureaucrats encounter in ‘getting a grip’ on citizen-clients. Drawing on status characteristics theory (Ridgeway, 1991) this study scrutinizes the epistemological problem too, i.e. how street-level bureaucrats know, by focusing on how their interpretation of signals is influenced by citizen-clients’ status characteristics. By analysing eleven semi-structured interviews with tax officials who inspect the acceptability of entrepreneurs’ tax returns, this study shows how status characteristics could lead to unequal evaluations of citizen-clients’ signals.