According to a World Bank study, if you paid all of your taxes in the Congo—a full thirty-two different payments—you would be dishing out 230 percent of your profits.53 In other words, you can only survive by cutting corners. The tax system had lost its overall coherence, as revenue-collecting agencies had proliferated over the years, each using exorbitant tax rates as blackmail to obtain bribes. The tax code was never intended to be followed; the state had created regulations that begged to be broken and had dreamt up its own subversion, pushing a large part of the economy into the informal
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