In 1887, the historian Lord Acton composed a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton that would yield one of the most enduring observations in political thought. “Power tends to corrupt,” Acton wrote, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He was not writing about tyrants or dictators. He was writing about popes—men who believed themselves to be acting in service of the highest good. This is precisely what makes his observation so unsettling, and so durable.
A Polish tax official is not a tyrant. He is a cog in a machine that behaves, as all machines of power do, according to its own internal logic: expanding where it can, interpreting ambiguity in its own favor, treating the citizen less as a partner than as a suspect. The problem of bureaucratic lawlessness is not, at its root, a problem of bad people. It is a problem of bad incentives.
- Further reading: The Boomerang: How Instruments of Repression Turn on Their Makers
Thomas Hobbes gave us the image of Leviathan—the state as artificial colossus, shielding citizens from the chaos of nature. But Hobbes was writing in the seventeenth century, when the state was comparatively feeble. The modern Leviathan has grown to dimensions he could not have imagined. Tax authorities, intelligence services, regulatory agencies—each commands powers that a medieval monarch would have envied.
James Madison, the architect of the American Constitution, understood the dilemma with characteristic clarity. “If men were angels,” he wrote, “no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” But men are not angels—neither those who are governed nor those who govern. Every system requires brakes.
In Poland, such brakes exist: administrative courts, appeal procedures, an ombudsman. Yet a brake functions only when someone applies it. The entrepreneur who does not know his rights, or lacks the nerve to assert them, lives, in effect, under a system with no brakes at all.
Gordon Tullock, the economist who helped found the public-choice school, analyzed the behavior of bureaucrats the way one might analyze any other economic actor: as rational agents maximizing their own utility. The bureaucrat maximizes job security, the avoidance of blame, a quiet life. In this calculus, denial is almost always safer than approval.
A delayed VAT refund poses zero risk to the official who delays it. A refund paid out and later deemed improper? That is a potential reprimand. A prolonged audit signals diligence. A quick one invites questions from superiors about whether everything was properly examined. The system rewards zealotry and punishes its absence. And zealotry directed at citizens is simply a polite word for abuse.
Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, spent decades documenting how bureaucracy strangles enterprise in the developing world. His conclusions travel well: every hour spent battling an agency is an hour not spent creating value. Bureaucratic lawlessness is not merely a direct injury. It is an opportunity cost borne by the entire economy.
The value-added tax is, in its way, a masterpiece of fiscal engineering—self-enforcing, difficult to evade, reliably productive of revenue. It has only one flaw: it requires refunds. And there the trouble begins.
For the state budget, every VAT refund is an expenditure. For the official, every refund is a risk. For the entrepreneur, every delayed refund is capital frozen in place. These three logics collide daily in thousands of proceedings—and too often, the logic backed by power prevails over the logic backed by right.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV, is said to have remarked that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” The modern tax apparatus sometimes forgets the second half of the formula. The hissing of Polish entrepreneurs grows louder—but it is muffled by a lack of tools to convert frustration into effective action.
A state that causes harm ought to repair it. The principle seems self-evident; in practice, it demands a fight. A lawsuit against the Treasury is not a formality. It is a proceeding in which one must prove the unlawfulness of the agency’s conduct, the existence of damage, and the causal link between the two.
But there is something at stake beyond money. Václav Havel wrote of “the power of the powerless”—the way a single act of resistance against a system alters the moral landscape. The entrepreneur who sues an agency for damages is doing something similar. He is saying: what you did to me had consequences, and I will pursue them.
Every successful claim against the state sends a signal to the system that lawlessness carries a price. That not everyone will accept it in silence. That there are limits—and that someone is watching.
Since 2006, Skarbiec Law Firm has stood with entrepreneurs in their disputes with the apparatus of the state. The Business Centre Club has noted our “courage in taking on difficult cases whose scale and complexity demand expert knowledge”—a description we treat not as flattery but as job specification.
We represent clients in tax and customs inspections. We supervise the conduct of officials. We recover frozen VAT refunds. We pursue damages for unlawful agency actions. We litigate before administrative courts at every level.
We believe that the fundamental problem in Poland is not that the administration lacks competence. It is that the administration has too much of it. And someone must ensure that competence does not become a tool of oppression.
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” Thomas Jefferson is supposed to have said, though the attribution is disputed. The attribution does not matter. The truth of the statement does. Our task is to ensure that entrepreneurs need not be vigilant alone.
