Taxes

In the Bep domain, individuals are typically taxed a small amount of money, and then a larger amount of tithes/materials or more money, depending on their local economy. Villages, localities, and other administrative units pay their taxes in material and corvées to the administrative levels above them. Notably, a corvée on the locality rarely means a corvée on the individual; the locality will typically have people working in the relevant sector already, or hire in people from elsewhere rather than disrupting their internal economy. Corvées are only passed to the individual level if there is a severe, non-local worker shortage and several layers of negotiations have failed.

The whole system is logistics-heavy and averse to generic tokens, due to people's general distrust of what's above them. This may be explained by the most statelike organ the Bep have still being a sort of pseudo-state resulting from people bullying their local mafias.

Historical context
brief context: after the Big Evil Empire went cold turkey, Bep society retained a lot of structural elements from its time as a vassal ~state, including a number of enforcement offices, many of which took it upon themselves to enforce whatever they saw fit once higher administration fell. the different offices began claiming sometimes-overlapping areas of responsibility in overlapping territories, often leading to petty conflict.

previously, these offices would preside over a number of local councils, in an oft-corrupt but at least clear structure. now, local councils began growing tired of several offices playing james bond and trying to extort them for services they didn't even provide, "protection money", etc. there used to be 1-2 offices bothering a given locality about pipeline maintenance, fire prevention, postal infrastructure, whatever; now up to a dozen would try to get paid, with the quality of services declining and many offices having no actual relation to the given council.

broadly speaking, the balance of power would begin shifting towards the local councils, which in many cases banded together on a small scale and began sorting out their own services, building from scratch or seizing by force nearby offices-turned-mafias to restore their function. due to the vast number and small scale of the offices, most of them were easy pickings once enough of society was annoyed with them; only the larger mafia-esque organizations would survive as independent entities, typically by actually being useful enough to dampen hostilities, running as utility service x crime syndicate hybrids. some number of smaller offices also survived by simply not engaging in mafioso shenanigans and retaining their roles as utility providers solely.

nobody at this time was trying to reclaim the whole of the bep cultural domain as previously united; the area's status as imperial vassal is the closest it's ever been to a "state" the way we use the term.

the remaining organizations did not hold much power. while in small-scale trafficking & extortion, they saw minimal interference, their main sources of influence would still be the chance to provide localities' utilities and services .. and this could at any time be taken over by another entity, rendering the organization outcast, much less relevant, and much less powerful. however, they did hold one thing; scale.

the wide reach of many utility syndicates(??) enabled them to act as mediators for different localities, initially only with respect to business deals, but with time also increasingly for resource exchange, coordinating laws, tariffs, etc. within about 200 years' time, some of the largest syndicate thingies would end up being pressured by the public to collaborate on some activities, effectively forming the beginnings of a semi-unitary governmental body. the current administrative structure still runs roughly the same way as what the larger organizations were forced to become, although increasing public accountability forced much of the business/extortions to formally split off into separate entities. there are still regularly feuds between organizations that are {split off from / affiliated with} the governing bodies, and organizations typically more on the "criminal" side that never got to run the show and are still bitter about it centuries later.

large bep snippet: taxes

so with that out of the way, how does taxation work? well, it varies by what scale we're looking at.

how the individual is taxed depends entirely on the locality they're in, usually run by a council that'll have some sort of internal economy set up. usually people pay in money or resources/tithes, depending on the area's internal economy. there's also a sort of paid corvée to ensure the function of a given industry by mandating people work in it, typical of more isolated communities (esp. mining settlements), but in most places it exists as an emergency measure only or not at all.

many localities require a general everything fee, typically to cover the services/utilities the locality provides for you, although not all utilities will be covered. water, for instance, tends to be something the individual has to subscribe to separately, meaning the "water borders" between water providers differ dramatically from more general administrative borders. if you happen to produce it, this fee is paid in a resource that the locality uses to pay the bills andor maintain the services it runs itself.

while land ownership isn't really quite a thing, *land use taxes* are also a prevalent feature of the individual economy. tithes aren't unheard of, but the decidedly most common form of land use regulation is a requirement for you to keep so and so much of your produce within the local economy. this tax is often more flexible in *what* resource you can pay with than the services fee, and thus it's more often paid in stuff.

money acts as a "backup" both with service fees and land use fees, used when you can't pay in something more directly useful. it's quite common for cooperatives/companies to do the shared land use taxes for everyone, and for individuals to hire acquisitions services to procure their tax resource for them with their money. especially in more impersonal, denser communities, paying money tax directly costs wayy more than the equivalent resource tax, so it helps to have a mediator sort your tax out for you. a rural person can acquire their tax yams themselves, but an urbanite in an industrial centre will usually need someone else to procure steel pipe for them.

the bep also view a local administration paying you for a certain land use or labour as a "reverse tax", meaning you're not only tax exempt but *anti-taxed* if you're working for the community, at the cost of probably not having much income from anything else.

more broadly, localities usually pay *their* bills in resources or corvées. a corvée imposed on a locality does not mean the locality will impose a corvée on its population, it just means the locality needs to ensure workers for something, either from its own labour pool or by hiring in from elsewhere. money is not typically used for transactions between administrative entities; this is a mechanism to ensure the recipient entity cannot take the money and run too easily.

more remote areas may simply not have any tax because there's no administration and no services to pay for, or have "tax" on a very small and informal scale where the five people living together in the woods try to keep things going. despite this, "tax havens" don't really happen, because if you drag enough workers out into the boonies to start an industry in "tax free land", they'll more than likely start taxing both you and themselves.