Tax collectors

In this turn of game 8's newspaper, Venice was proclaiming that adopting tax collectors would increase tax collections by 10%.

If so, that seems like a kind of no-brainer investment for many. Does anybody have experience doing it? Was it worth it? Did you get 10%? More? Less?

The downside to tax collectors is honour. I lost many points. You may gain in revenue,differing amounts depending which nation you play and their current position but you lose honour points. Your Nobles are not happy paying taxes. As it stands they collect and pay taxes,so taking it away from their hands only leads to anger and resentment from them.

In game 2 Idropped the tax on Foregin merchants as the income was less than the cost of the admin, EH went up.With reference to the honour score and the nobles I guess you can exempt them from tax to protect your honour score. Afterall an increase on the Nobility will simply mean that the commoners will have to pay higher rents to them so it could well be that you lower income from them. which will lower EH. it is i think a question of balance between Honour and EH.

I did the same think in game 3. My economy was so anemic that it seemed not worth the effort to collect it! Fortunately, that and some other actions have helped it recover.

trouble is when you lower taxes to increase EH when for some reason trade colapses war copetition etc then you have no back up income.

Well, in my case, I just zeroed out taxes on foreign trade. The trade was so negligible that I really wasn't losing anything at all. I figured that the zero tax rate would encourage foreigners to come trade, and improve my economy. So far it seems to be helping though hard to tell what its effect is among the other actions I did.

Anybody else have experience implementing tax collectors and their effects?

What's the difference between Tax adminstrators and Tax Collectors?

I thought most have "tax farmers", but can implement tax collectors by training 1,000 men per million of population at an administration academy.

Tax farmers, commonly noble, pay the crown for the right to collect a particular tax. They make their profit on the spread between what they pay for the right, and what they collect.

Hence when you put in your own tax collectors, you take that spread from the nobles and give it to the crown. I guess most are saying that annoys the nobles, which seems reasonable.

I don't know if there is a difference between a tax administrator and a tax collector though?

All taxes are unpopular, they damage honour and ecomomic health, as there is less money to invest on trade. There is maybe another question that can be disscussed along side this one that is what is the most efficient way to collect taxes, as this will lead to either more income or allow you to lower taxes and keep the same income from inefficent collection.

I have read mostly about Portugal during the period, and it was definitely quite true there, and as you say, it was true as well in England.

Given nobility's historic distaste for soiling their hands with lowly trade, I would suppose that tax farming was one of they few legitimate ways they thought they had to improve their wealth, so would look dimly upon anyone closing that door for them.

My guess is that for the sake of sanity, Richard has normalized tax collection methodologies for most nations, giving everyone roughly equivalent ways to improve their tax collection methods. My read of what happened is Portugal was so ridiculously complex that any historical simulation game couldn't help but abstract it. Otherwise, the game would have to be called "The Glory of the Royal Accountants!"

It maybe an idea to set an administration academy to train both tax inspectors & collectors, It would also maybe an idea to pass laws exactly stating that tax avoidance is a capital offence. which may act as an incentive to pay. Harsh but I think in keeping with the tone of the period.
Or you can follow another model and let the military take over the enforcement of your taxation policy, a bit heavy handed. However this is what to a certain extent happened in Brandenburg-Preußen, it was copied to a lesser extent in other German states.

An academy can only do one thing at a time. So you can only get a academy to train tax inspectors or tax collectors, unless you want to open up two academies at the same time. Each one different.

From experiance,tax collectors and inspectors take up huge numbers of recruits each and is very expensive as well.

From memory,as France it took a years worth of recruits for the above two.So i did one at a time.

Even now i question the worth of it all.

There is also the breakthrough at a business Academy of Book Keeping which will also help with tax collection & regulation. Is the introduction of a tax collection system and Inspection similar to setting up a Judicary or Medical service? that the number of collectors is dictated by population?

yes, i believe it is.

Yes, it is definitely 1,000 tax collectors per 1M population or part there of.

I didn't know you could research improvements in tax collecting at an administration academy, but it makes sense.

It is probably a good idea to introduce a standard weights & measures law as well, I would guess this could be done in a similar way as revaluing your currency as you would have to standerdise, across your territories. then again you need a good customs and excise control as well. the standard measures would ease the overseeing of income from taxes, coupled with book keeping it should help improve control and hopefully raise levels of tax income.

jamesbond007 wrote:The downside to tax collectors is honour. I lost many points. You may gain in revenue,differing amounts depending which nation you play and their current position but you lose honour points. Your Nobles are not happy paying taxes. As it stands they collect and pay taxes,so taking it away from their hands only leads to anger and resentment from them.

correct.... they cannot hide the money from a tax collector who was usually paid by results