Congolese case, resulting from high-ability types being more effective when paired with similarly high-ability teammates, particularly when collecting from households with higher payment likelihoods – will likely vary across contexts, but could be fruitfully identified through policy experimentation.

In short, the available evidence is consistent with more staff being able to bring in more revenues, while reallocation of tax officials towards higher return activities can yield non-trivial revenue gains, potentially achieved at low cost, for resource-constrained authorities.

# _Incentives of Tax Officials_

The incentives that tax officials encounter will shape their effectiveness, and by extension, a tax authority’s collection capacity. Ample evidence from the public sector suggests incentives can modulate what types of individuals accept roles within bureaucracies and how well they perform. <mark>Higher wages or better career benefits offered for public sector positions can attract more able applicants without compromising motivation (as Dal Bo et al. (2013) show in Mexico and A</mark> shraf et al. (2020) in Zambia).

In theory, when designing incentive structures, tax authorities should seek to trade off gains in tax collections against the costs of monetary and non-monetary incentives for staff. In practice, tax administrations operate within government bureaucracies that may constrain options through rigid salary structures, limits on performance incentives, and political considerations. Within the scope of feasible incentive structures, how much can we expect the incentives facing tax officials to matter?

One factor consists in how elastic collections are to effort and skills – or other factors like dishonesty – within a certain job. For tax officials engaged in customs, as one example, there might seem less scope for pure effort to impact tax revenues (because of rote processing of total shipments), but larger scope for skills like attentiveness (monitoring product misclassification and underdeclaration to evade tariffs) and dishonesty (bribes in exchange for misclassification) to influence trade tax collections. For service staff tasked with registering informal firms, sheer effort in identifying, locating, and communicating the process of formalization to such businesses may matter comparatively more.

In lower-income countries, the work of taxation still largely involves in-person interactions with taxpayers. On average, 74 percent of firms in low-income countries say they are required to meet with tax officials and on average 3.4 meetings are held per year, compared to 26 percent of firms and 1.8 meetings in high-income countries (World Bank Enterprise Surveys). Tax collectors receive payments, often in cash, from individuals and firms, audits require inspection visits to premises rather than examining taxpayer financial accounts, and registration drives involving physical outreach are periodically undertaken to extend the tax net over sizeable informal economies. The interpersonal nature of this work – along with officials’ discretion over outcomes – naturally increases opportunities for greater revenue but also corruption.

suggesting that governments with low staff capacity can realize revenue gains by involving agents outside the official state administration (Balán et al., 2022).

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