Tax Administration and the Courts From Colonial Times to the Present.

At the time of the Revolution, the institutions adopted for tax administration in most colonies were small-scale, if not strictly local, holdovers from earlier eras. The job of the collector had some of the aspects of an 'office' in the medieval sense; the collector would rarely would have been viewed as employees and acted only according to warrants. The collector's job was to enforce the essentially political decisions of the tax-setting body, with varying degrees of entirely localized and generally unreviewable discretion. Courts were used to ensure that the collectors performed their duties in the sense that they paid over the revenues due, but only with great difficulty could the courts be used to intervene between the collector and the taxpayer. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, most jurisdictions had moved to revenue systems that were frequently more centralized and certainly more recognizable as part of a professional bureaucratic system. Courts were more likely to be playing a regular role in tax administration, with both the taxpayer and the collector finding court intervention available with far greater frequency. On appropriate occasions, courts could even be used to block the collection of a tax before it could start. This evolution of the tax administration process, from an almost extra-legal process to an administrative process answerable like most others to the supervision of the courts, in many senses stalled in the early twentieth century. For all of the recent bluster about taxpayer's rights in Congress, the interaction between the courts and collector is still less than that between the courts and other large administrative agencies. This paper outlines the contours of this history and suggests some tentative explanations for both the initial legalization of tax administration, and the limited extent of that legalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]