Meta risk management and tax system integrity

Abstract

Meta risk management means the risk management of risk management. The \nAustralian Taxation Office (Tax Office) has an international reputation as an \norganisation that is sophisticated in risk management. The aim of this working paper \nis to understand how it is developing a capability in meta risk management and how it \ncan extend that capability. \nDrawing together a number of longstanding themes in the regulation literature with \nmore recent writing on neo-liberal governmentality, Peter Grabosky (1995) developed \nthe theme of meta regulation, which he called ‘meta-monitoring’ - government \nmonitoring of self-monitoring. He elaborated further on these ideas with Neil \nGunningham (1998) in Smart Regulation: Designing Environmental Policy. The most \nsustained development of this approach is in Christine Parker’s forthcoming book The \nOpen Corporation: Self-Regulation and Corporate Citizenship. The penultimate \nchapter of that book is entitled ‘Meta-Regulation: The Regulation of Self-Regulation’. \nParker jointly explores notions of meta-regulation and meta-evaluation - evaluation of \ncorporations' self-evaluations of their compliance systems. In this working paper, we \nseek to give these ideas more of a risk-management orientation and one specifically \nattuned to tax administration. \nAccording to Ulrich Beck’s (1992) influential book Risk Society: Towards a New \nModernity, societies have become more reflexive about risk. The Tax Office's Risk \nManagement System can be seen as an example of tax administration reflexively \nremaking tax administration in a risk paradigm. To date, however, the Tax Office \nRisk Management System has been a rather conventional case of a regulatory \norganisation getting more analytic about the risks the organisation must confront. A \nfurther step toward a reflexive risk paradigm is for the Tax Office to monitor and seek \nto remake the risk management systems of the organisations it regulates. This is a \nmove from the Tax Office developing its own Risk Management System to \ninfluencing the risk management systems of other important organisations in its risk \nenvironment.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 54 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.