Taxation: A Discipline Inaccessible to Most Citizens
Taxation is perceived by most citizens as an inaccessible discipline, filled with numbers, acronyms, doctrines, and decrees. Every year, the Finance Law is voted on after a simplified and truncated debate, despite its direct impact on purchasing power, investment, employment, and social cohesion. This situation is not only due to the complexity of the tax system; it is also due to the lack of intermediation between institutions and citizens, a role that serious, reliable, and quality journalism should play.
An Opaque and Undebated Tax System
Over the years, the tax system has become a field reserved for insiders: finance inspectors, tax specialists, accountants, administrative officials, or specialized parliamentarians. However, taxation is not a purely technical matter; it is first and foremost a political and social choice. It reflects how the state distributes charges and benefits, finances its priorities, and arbitrates between equity and efficiency. But due to the lack of clear communication, accessible data, and an influx of difficult-to-follow texts, citizens are kept at a distance. They suffer from taxation without understanding it or being able to contest it in an informed manner. It is in this context - prone to errors, abuses, and misunderstandings - that journalists must play an essential role: to be the voice of taxpayers, highlight the system's shortcomings, and translate tax language into a vocabulary accessible to the non-initiated public.
Fiscal Journalism: A Bridge Between Experts and Citizens
Fiscal journalism is not limited to relaying the Ministry of Finance's press releases. Its mission is to make the unreadable readable, to translate technicality into social issues, and to open up spaces for debate on tax justice, the quality of public spending, and the consistency of budgetary policies. By explaining the provisions of finance laws, verifying numbers, questioning government choices, and confronting different viewpoints, journalists contribute to democratizing taxation. Each article, each report, and each analysis allows for the placement of taxes in their citizen dimension: an instrument of solidarity and development, and not just a simple levy.
The Debate on Finance Laws: A Major Democratic Issue
The public debate around finance laws remains insufficient today, often reduced to a few punctual polemics. Yet, it is a key moment in the country's economic policy: it is where priorities, arbitrations, and efforts required from each social category are decided. Rigorous and committed journalism can transform this technical moment into a high point of participatory democracy, helping citizens to understand:
- What the new tax measures are
- Who really benefits from them
- And what their impact will be on daily life and the national economy
A Field Fertile for Investigative Journalism
Taxation is also a particularly fertile ground for investigative journalism. Behind the texts and numbers, economic interests, avoidance practices, selective exemptions, and sometimes abuses of power are hidden. Tax investigations, whether they concern fraud, corruption, or the misuse of incentives, make it possible to reveal the blind spots of the system and remind us that transparency is not a luxury, but a democratic requirement. The OECD itself recognizes the contribution of investigative journalism to the fight against international tax evasion. In several reports, the organization emphasizes that journalistic revelations - such as the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers - have made it possible to recover billions of dollars in tax revenue and strengthen cooperation between states. These examples show that free, competent, and persevering journalism can have concrete effects on tax justice and public governance. In Tunisia as well, the tax field offers considerable potential for investigation: evaluation of tax expenditures, monitoring of exemptions, transparency of revenue from natural resources, control of sectoral benefits, or consistency between reform promises and administrative practices.
Training and Equipping Journalists: A Necessity
To fully play this role, journalists must be well-trained and equipped with adapted tools: basic economic notions, critical reading of finance laws, understanding of budgetary data, and above all, effective access to public information. Encouraging the development of specialized economic and tax journalism is not a luxury: it is an essential condition for building a responsible and well-informed public opinion, capable of demanding accountability and participating in the enlightened reflection necessary for this task. It is by informing well that we reform, and it is by making taxation comprehensible and accessible that we can finally make it more just.
Note: The opinion expressed in this editorial only engages its author. It is the expression of a personal point of view.
