Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

This chapter contributes an ethnographic case study on the creation of international tax norms at the OECD during the ‘Base Erosion Profit Shifting’ initiative. I argue that what makes countries share taxing rights and multinational corporations give money, as in tax to specific jurisdictions and not to others, is not necessarily this ‘natural’ law of reciprocity, but changes to the dominant modes of relatedness, conversation, and presence in international tax norms. Tax scholars, but also recent anthropological studies on tax, explore taxes against a gift-exchange logic. I suggest that this conceptual obsession with mutual interest, return, and benefits obscures the fact that taxes are often unilateral monetary transactions. More generally, it overlooks the human capacity to give and provide, under specific conditions, without calculating or receiving something in return. While taxation is not a form of sharing, I argue that it is productive to pay attention to the many similarities between these two types of transfers. They share, at times as I show in the chapter, more commonalities than taxation and reciprocal gift exchanges, and there are moments when taxation facilitates and enables sharing.

Accountability, or the way people explain and justify specific social situations, ‘is part of the general fabric of human interchange’ (Strathern 2000a: 4). It is a concept of central importance to the understanding of social action (Garfinkel 1967: 1). Futhermore, public accountability is evidently required for good governance, redistributive justice and fair resource allocation as it can minimise unpredictability and arbitrariness and can control discretion (Dowdle 2006; Mashaw 2006). How quantitative forms of accountability shape the way people work and experience their accountability in different organisational fields is therefore an important social question worthy of (more) sustained investigation. This is especially the case when one considers that the pressure for quantitative evaluation and demands for quantitative accountability have been on the rise over the past two decades.

Prosecutors are powerful actors in the South African criminal justice system as in many other jurisdictions worldwide (UN 1990; Schönteich 2001; 2002; Jehle, Wade and Elsner 2008; Luna and Wade 2012; Tonry 2012a, 2012b). In South Africa the National Prosecuting Authority Act 32 of 1998 and Section 179 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996 equip them with extensive powers of discretion to initiate or discontinue criminal proceedings on behalf of the state, backed by the power of the state.

They decide who to charge with a criminal offence, what charges to file and when to dismiss or withdraw a case.

When the old apartheid prosecuting authority was transformed and the first new National Prosecuting Authority was established in 1998, one of the main objectives of the new NPA leadership was to legitimise the power of prosecutors in the eyes of those they had until recently suppressed. They envisioned prosecutors, as I mentioned before, as ‘lawyers for the people’ (Barrell and Soggott 1998; Schönteich 2001: 1). To be accountable became an important and desirable good in that transformation process.

Are the NPA and the prosecutorial profession accountable today? Are they more accountable than before 1994? While I showed in Chapter 1 that the accountability mechanism governing the NPA and its employees has been clearly diversified and intensified since 1998, I also argued at various stages of this book that whether accountability has been rendered depends to a large extent on the involved actors’ understandings of the concept.

This is a book about accountability. More specifically, it is about quantitative accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in South Africa. I am interested in how prosecutors, who have the power to call others to account for wrongdoing, are themselves held accountable Central to this study is the role played by recently introduced performance measurement systems in the way prosecutors are held accountable. I explore how these measurement systems shape and influence South African prosecutors’ understanding of accountability and their prosecutorial practices.I ask whether there are significant implications for legal work, as the language of ‘performance statistics’ ‘indicators’ ‘targets’, ‘rates’ and ‘rankings’ is becoming common parlance within the judicial system.

While numerical representations are gaining increasing importance for the demonstration of accountability in many government and non-government settings in the twenty-first century, the effects and consequences of this for our social, institutional and political life are relatively opaque.

The ethnographic study of multi-local organisations provides the researcher with a challenge, ‘given ethnography’s focus on local places, on small scale, more or less observable social units and the cultural meanings and practices that constitute them’ as Merry states(2006: 980; see also Czarniawska 2008: 5). The ethnographer’s units of observation – her field sites – are harder, for example, to locate within a national state organisation like the NPA whose over three thousand employees work simultaneously in nine different provinces in national and regional head offices and in hundreds of district, regional and high courts, scattered around South Africa.