Chapter 2 offers the first full illustration of the trade-off between raising revenue and enforcing the norm of truth reporting. In traditional theories of tax compliance, audits are the primary tool of enforcement. It has been assumed that audits in China are carried out by tax inspection (jicha) bureaus. However, drawing on archival material and a novel dataset, I show that the practice of mandatory taxpayer “self-inspections” predominates in the jicha system. Self-inspections allow the tax authority to raise revenue by foregoing penalties on noncompliant taxpayers, but threaten to erode the government’s deterrence power. By making self-inspections a perennial and integral part of enforcement, Chinese tax inspectors largely abandon the goal of enforcing the norm of truthful reporting. Chapter 2 then pivots to the much larger segment of Chinese tax administration called “revenue management.” Although revenue managers routinely process tax returns, they are even less likely to enforce truthful reporting norms, because of the competition with tax inspection to meet revenue targets and because of a lack of specialization. Therefore, what one might have thought was an immutable component of tax administration – audits – is largely absent from Chinese practice.