The Selection Asymmetry
Why discretionary audit selection cannot price compliance risk, and what cross-ledger reconciliation must replace it with
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Why discretionary audit selection cannot price compliance risk, and what cross-ledger reconciliation must replace it with
Withholding takes the tax before the payee holds the money and distributes collection across thousands of independent payers at no administrative cost beyond oversight. It should leak least. It frequently leaks most. This study asks why.
A trading business records its own sales, purchases and stock. Gross margin follows by arithmetic, and clusters by trade. A business far outside its band is not hiding — the anomaly sits in data the authority already holds. This study asks why it so rarely reads it.
Physical presence is a stamped arrival, a stamped departure, and a date — recorded by an agency with no stake in the tax outcome. It should be the most defensible input a revenue authority holds. The assessments built on it are among the most frequently wrong.
Salary and wages tax is highly administrable in theory, yet leaks heavily in practice. This diagnostic study decomposes the reconciliation deficit and proposes a vendor-neutral three-ledger model.
An audit follows a sequence every manual states in the same terms. A sequence is a fact rather than an opinion — it either was followed or it was not. It should be the most governable thing an authority does. It is the first thing to fail.
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