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Since 2008-2009, the governments in France and Great Britain have encouraged more rigorous penalization of tax evaders. This paper aims to investigate the implementation of these policies on the basis of an important and original empirical material.

The study done in France relies on interviews conducted with representatives of law enforcement agencies on public statistics and on an innovative database compiled from nearly 600 cases submitted to the judiciary. The comparison with Great Britain is developed through interviews conducted with different participants in the fight against tax fraud and statistical information.

This paper describes the recent evolution of the machinery for screening tax-related wrongdoings in France and in the UK. It demonstrates that whilst publicly calling for harsh punishment against tax dodgers, in practice, both governments tend to seek a balance between the growing demand for tax equality and the belief that the State should not intervene in the economic realm. This strategy leads to the over-representation of certain categories of taxpayers. Despite the commonalities resulting from the numerous filters before prosecution, the penal strategy takes on two different shapes on either side of the Channel: whereas the British institutions support an “exemplary punitive” system, French regulatory system favours a “quasi-administrative” treatment. The French tax authority continues to use the criminal procedures mainly as a financial instrument for the improved restitution of stolen taxes. The policy of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, supported by the “Sentencing Guidelines”, aims much more at obtaining exemplary convictions.

Based on a large empirical material, this paper highlights the different outcomes of the criminal trials against tax evaders in the two countries.

The work connects classic theories of selfing to the COVID-19 pandemic to make fresh connections between pandemic-induced trauma to the self and digital resources. This research introduces the concept of the “traumatized self” emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to digital disadvantage and digital hyperconnectivity. From Cooley’s original “looking glass self” to Wellman’s “hyperconnected” individualist self, social theories of identity work, and production of the self have a long and interdisciplinary history. In documenting this history, the discussion outlines key foci in the theorizing of the digital self by mapping how digital selfing and identity work have been treated from the inception of the internet to the epoch of the pandemic. The work charts the evolution of the digital selfing project from key theoretical perspectives, including postmodernism, symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. Putting these approaches in dialogue with the traumatized self, this research makes a novel contribution by introducing the concept of digitally differentiated trauma, which scholars can employ to better understand selfing processes in such circumstances and times.