Tax Bill Risks Turning Every Citizen into a Suspect
Reading some of Angola’s recent legislation can leave one wondering whether the problem lies with the reader, the drafter or a lawmaker legislating for a country that exists only on paper.
Article 45(2) of the proposed Personal Income Tax Code, known by its Portuguese acronym IRPS, states:
“Financial institutions must also submit to the Tax Administration, by January 31 and through the electronic transmission of data, information concerning receipts credited to clients during the previous financial year.”
The language may sound merely bureaucratic. Its implications are anything but.
The provision would require banks to report every amount received on behalf of every client during the previous year. In effect, every sum entering a depositor’s account would be transmitted to the tax authorities — even a small gift from a grandmother to pay for biscuits.
This is a striking example of how lawmakers, whether under pressure from international institutions or driven by excessive fiscal zeal, can move beyond the constitutional boundaries that should constrain the power to tax.
It is both a technical excess and an example of poor legislative drafting. More importantly, it creates a mechanism that appears to violate fundamental principles of the rule of law, including proportionality and the right to privacy.
The mass and indiscriminate reporting of bank receipts, regardless of their nature, origin, purpose or tax relevance, would turn financial institutions into investigative extensions of the Tax Administration. Banking secrecy would become little more than a decorative concept, while the constitutional protection of citizens’ financial lives would be emptied of meaning.
The first constitutional objection concerns proportionality.
Angola’s Constitution allows restrictions on fundamental rights, but only when they serve a legitimate purpose and are appropriate, necessary and proportionate. Article 57 establishes the framework within which such restrictions must operate.
Requiring the transmission of every payment received by every bank customer, without any risk assessment, evidence of wrongdoing or concrete fiscal relevance, amounts to the mass collection of personal data. Such a measure cannot reasonably be described as strictly necessary to combat tax fraud or enforce tax obligations.
The state cannot use fiscal supervision as a pretext for indiscriminately collecting information about the financial lives of millions of citizens, most of whom are not suspected of any tax offence.
A constitutional democracy should not permit preventive economic surveillance of the entire population. Yet that is, in substance, what Article 45(2) proposes.
The provision also suffers from a lack of precision. Legislation affecting fundamental rights cannot impose vague, unlimited or disproportionate obligations.
The proposed reporting requirement does not distinguish between taxable and non-taxable income. It does not separate actual income from movements of capital, commercial payments from private transfers, or transactions with fiscal significance from ordinary acts of family or personal life.
That failure to distinguish between fundamentally different categories suggests that lawmakers have not properly defined the scope of the obligation. Instead, the proposal grants the Tax Administration an excessively broad power to collect and process financial information.
There is a further constitutional concern: the protection of personal data, recognised as an autonomous fundamental right under Articles 32, 34 and 69 of the Constitution.
The mass electronic transmission of banking information exposes citizens to the risks of misuse, unauthorised access, processing errors and abusive cross-referencing of data.
The state should not collect sensitive information without a robust framework governing security, oversight and the purposes for which the data may be used.
Article 45(2) provides no meaningful safeguards. It does not clearly define the purposes of the collection, establish retention periods or place adequate limits on how the information may subsequently be used.
It therefore conflicts with two elementary principles of data protection: data minimisation and purpose limitation. A state should collect only the information it needs and use it only for clearly defined and legitimate purposes.
The problem becomes more serious when this provision is considered alongside other unrealistic obligations contained in the proposed legislation.
Article 37 would require all personal income taxpayers to submit their annual returns electronically by March 15.
The obvious question is whether every taxpayer in Angola is capable of filing a return online. The equally obvious answer is no.
Angola continues to face high levels of digital exclusion. Large parts of the population lack reliable internet access or basic digital services. Connectivity remains unstable in many areas, while elderly people, rural communities and citizens with limited digital literacy face substantial barriers.
In this context, an exclusively electronic filing system is not merely unrealistic. It is discriminatory and socially unjust.
The proposal appears to ignore the country’s material circumstances. It assumes the existence of the infrastructure, connectivity and digital literacy found in highly digitised European states. Angola is not Finland or Lithuania, and legislation cannot wish such conditions into existence.
The bill’s detachment from reality is therefore visible on two fronts.
On the one hand, banks would be required to provide a level of comprehensive reporting that even many sophisticated tax systems would hesitate to impose without thresholds, exemptions or risk-based criteria.
On the other, individual citizens would be expected to comply through digital channels that are simply unavailable to a significant part of the population.
Rather than advancing tax justice, such a system would deepen inequality. It would place the greatest burden on those least able to comply, penalise vulnerable citizens and further widen the distance between the governed and those who govern them.
A state that depends on its citizens for revenue while treating those same citizens as potential adversaries risks undermining its own political foundations.
History offers repeated warnings about the consequences of fiscal power exercised without restraint. Tax grievances helped fuel both the American and French revolutions. Those events were, of course, driven by many forces, but taxation became a symbol of governments that demanded obedience and revenue without adequate representation, fairness or accountability.
The lesson is not that every defective tax law produces a revolution. It is that the abuse of fiscal authority can corrode the social contract on which political legitimacy depends.
When the state demands more than it provides, and governs against the people on whom it relies, it ceases to be regarded as a legitimate authority. It begins to resemble an arbitrary power. It is within that loss of legitimacy that the conditions for political rupture develop.
Neither the Constitution nor common sense permits the state to treat every citizen as a suspect. Nor should it be allowed to collect personal financial information without clear criteria, or to impose obligations that large numbers of citizens are practically incapable of meeting.
Article 45(2) is therefore constitutionally objectionable because it violates proportionality, financial privacy and the protection of personal data. It is abusive because it reduces banking secrecy to a fiction. And it is unrealistic because it assumes technical and administrative capacities that Angola does not yet possess.
A state that fails to understand these limits risks turning taxation from an instrument of redistribution and equity into a mechanism of surveillance and coercion.