Hongwu Daming: Why hasn't my son rebelled?

Chapter 164
Chen Shuhao was originally a small county magistrate.

Just like most other low-level officials, when reporting taxes every year, he always asks the county magistrate to go to the capital's household department to report taxes with a blank document with the official seal.

As for how much data is written on the official document, it still depends on how much data is calculated by the Ministry of Accounts.

When the time comes, fill it in and you're done.

Although the county under Chen Shuhao's jurisdiction is not too far from Yingtian Mansion, it only takes about a month to go back and forth.

However, blank printing of documents is already an unwritten habit in the officialdom, and Chen Shuhao naturally does not seriously count the taxation situation in the jurisdiction.

Simpler is of course better.

He didn't think it was dereliction of duty, after all, it was the official rules.

This is the same principle as being an official in the officialdom and being a human being. If you don’t do what everyone else does, aren’t you very out of group?

In the beginning, Chen Shuhao also dealt with tax affairs respectfully, and the excess tax was also paid to the higher authorities.

But once when I was having dinner with the magistrate above, I was instructed by the people next to me.

It is a matter of course to pay some of the extra tax to the higher authorities, but you should also keep some for yourself.

Chen Shuhao was naturally not happy at the beginning, and even said that if he is an official, he must be honest and upright.

But as time goes by, looking at the colleagues around me, they will get a little profit from these blank printed documents from time to time.

Chen Shuhao naturally couldn't hold back anymore.

It happened that there was an urgent need for money at home, Chen Shuhao looked at the remaining money and food on hand.

All the silver bills verified by the Ministry of Accounts have been sent up, and the rest of these things really don't matter to anyone.

Even if I hand it over to the magistrate, the higher-ups may not necessarily hand it over to the court, so I might as well take some of it myself for an emergency, it's not a big deal.

Thinking so, Chen Shuhao deducted hundreds of taels from the silver taels for emergency use.

But after the first time, there will be a second and a third time soon.

This time, even Chen Shuhao felt that it was nothing.

After all, the imperial court never meant to ask.

But I didn't expect that the empty printing case broke out so quickly this time.

But most of the unlucky ones were officials from the imperial court's household department. Most of the local officials, as far as Chen Shuhao knew, had not been questioned or arrested by the imperial court.

But what Chen Shuhao didn't know was that the reason why the imperial court hadn't arrested them was because the internal investigation was still going on.

After the investigation was over, Jin Yiwei soon found Chen Shuhao.

When Jin Yiwei knocked on the door and took him away, Chen Shuhao quickly understood what it was for.

He lost all courage in an instant.

However, he still insisted on not wanting to confess his crimes, after all, the court had no evidence.

And my own blank papers are the same as others, so many people use blank papers, so they can't all be punished, right?

What's more, there is no evidence!

Chen Shuhao, who had such thoughts in mind, did not open his mouth even after beating him twice, until Jin Yiwei spread the account book in front of Chen Shuhao.

Facing the ledger, Chen Shuhao gritted his teeth.

"This must be a fake account. How could I embezzle so much money?"

In fact, Jin Yiwei had long expected that an official like Chen Shuhao would use such an excuse to exonerate himself.

However, with the account book calculated by His Royal Highness King Liao, it is clear at a glance what is wrong.

For example, the tax of the county under Chen Shuhao's jurisdiction is on the head tax, which is not the same as that on the yellow book of the central household department.

Then go to the county to visit on the spot and see how many families there are.

As long as it is confirmed that the actual poll tax in the local taxation is more than the yellow book of the central household department, then the remaining money is not Chen Shuhao's corruption?
This is the ironclad evidence of the seriousness. Even if Chen Shuhao has 1 reasons, he still cannot escape the guilt.

And these things, of course Jin Yiwei did it in advance.

When Chen Shuhao put all the data and evidence in front of him, he didn't have any confidence.

In this way, local officials like Chen Shuhao interrogated almost hundreds of people overnight.

And none of these hundreds of people has been wronged, as long as the tax gap is more than [-]%, it means they have embezzled.

Zhu Qi's method is almost accurate to every county.

There are still many officials in the follow-up, waiting to be interrogated one by one.

While arresting those corrupt officials to the maximum extent, it is also possible to recover the country's property from their mouths.

After all, in Zhu Qi's opinion, it is useless to just kill these corrupt officials.

After all, the money stolen by these corrupt officials has not been recovered, but the actual losses are real.

Besides, these corrupt officials are ready-made labor.

Those who have corrupted too much will definitely be beheaded as an example to others.

And those who are not particularly corrupt, there is no need to kill them all.

They can completely use waste and use it as coolies. Land reclamation in this frontier is very labor-intensive.

Isn't it a good thing to let them cut down trees to open up wasteland, and then distribute the land to the people?
Being an official is to serve the people.

Zhu Yuanzhang was also in a good mood after seeing so many tangible achievements that Zhu Qi had obtained in investigating the empty seal case.

On the one hand, it was because the corrupt officials were caught with real evidence, and on the other hand, it was also because the state recovered a large amount of stolen money.

If Zhu Qi's account book is not used as evidence, whether the stolen money can be recovered is really a question mark.

And Zhu Qi also began to take advantage of Zhu Yuanzhang's good mood to express his views.

First of all, these officials cannot be killed. If they are all killed, killing so many people is a waste of fresh labor.

Needless to say, it is needless to say that the decapitation of more than 1000 taels of embezzlement.

Those who embezzle less than 1000 taels will be divided into five years, ten years, 20 years and life-long hard labor according to the size of the amount.

For these local officials, most of them are still in their 30s, and there is no problem at all if they serve 20 years in prison.

As for the officials of the central household department who committed crimes, each of them is over forty or fifty years old. There is actually no big difference between 20 years of hard labor and lifelong hard labor for these officials.

And those who can collude with local officials to commit crimes in the position of the Ministry of Household Affairs, the value of corruption is definitely not small, even if it is not more than 1000 taels, it is enough to be sentenced to lifelong hard labor.

In addition to using these offending officials as labor slaves and sending them to the frontiers to reclaim land, there is another most important strategy, which is to improve the current taxation agencies of Ming Dynasty.

The facts of the empty seal case have proved that the ability of local officials in Daming is really poor in terms of taxation.

In fact, this is also a common problem of various dynasties. After all, not every dynasty attaches as much importance to the development of mathematics as the Tang Dynasty.

Especially after the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty, there were still developed commercial activities and sound commercial taxation support.

The country conducts business on its own every year, and receives a lot of money from merchants. After the Song Dynasty, mathematics has basically stagnated, or even regressed. Confucian students did not learn mathematics at all.

There is no mathematics in the imperial examinations. They are all about the Four Books and Five Classics.

Officials selected in this way, how much mathematical attainment can they be expected to have?
As for things like taxation, not to mention how sensitive you are to numbers, but at least you must be very familiar with it, and you must be very careful to be able to undertake tax work.

When recruiting civil servants in modern countries, the tax bureau at least has professional requirements.

So the first thing is to separate the taxation function from the current officials, and we can no longer let the officials and the central household department be in charge of taxation.

On the one hand, they are unprofessional, on the other hand, they are both athletes and referees, so expect them to be conscious?

Create a new agency - the Tax Office!

Moreover, this tax bureau should be directly responsible to the emperor like Jin Yiwei, instead of taking orders from the three provinces and six ministries.

Why did Jin Yiwei always have a bad relationship with the officials?

That's because of these, because it's not in the same system with officials at all.

We don't even see each other face to face, let alone get to know each other.

Can this develop any relationship?

Moreover, Jin Yiwei is also dedicated to investigating the criminal evidence of officials. He is born like a cat and a mouse, so the relationship is naturally not much better.

Like Jin Yiwei, the tax bureau should also be arranged to be on the opposite side of the local officials.

The modern tax office is a perfect template.

Local officials are responsible for counting the yellow books, and officials of the tax bureau are responsible for collecting taxes according to the yellow books.

Some people may ask, why not let the officials of the tax bureau directly collect taxes and count the yellow books?

Wouldn't it be a waste of manpower and cause work troubles to act separately?
That's right, if the officials of the tax bureau are unified to count the yellow books and collect taxes, it can indeed save a lot of trouble.

But what is saved is only the trouble of local officials. They have nothing to do, and they still have to run errands.

Moreover, on the one hand, if the taxation officials are directly responsible for the taxation, it will easily breed corruption.

As mentioned earlier, referees and athletes must be separated.

Therefore, if it is split into two departments to be responsible separately, it can play a role of supervision and checks and balances.

In short, one sentence: Government departments related to people's lives should be as simple as possible, while government departments related to finance should be as complicated as possible. In addition, multi-departmental responsibility can achieve maximum supervision and cleanliness.

This is why the organization of the modern State Taxation Bureau is always very large. In addition to the tax collection department, there are various supervision, auditing and so on.

And almost all of them are omnipotent, from calculating taxes to investigating and recovering accounts, that is simply 007 in the officialdom.

You said that it is not troublesome to calculate and count these taxes over and over again?

Of course it is troublesome, but if you are so troublesome, the trouble is the treasury tax.

Still take the middle and late Ming Dynasty as an example.

In the last years of Chongzhen, the annual tax revenue was less than 80. Li Zicheng sent troops to Beijing, and the entire treasury could not make up 3 taels. The officials still donated 20.

After Li Zicheng broke through the city of Beijing, he seized 3000 million taels of silver alive.

This is only the money of the officials in Beijing, and the money of those officials scattered all over the country is needless to say.

This is a major problem with the national tax system.

Of course, there are also some ideological problems.

Daming is dead, what does it have to do with my officials and gentry?
On the one hand, the government and gentry do not pay taxes, land mergers are more serious, the common people cannot pay taxes, there are more and more refugees, the state tax revenue is decreasing, and more money is spent, and taxes have to be increased.

Form a vicious circle.

On the other hand, the local officials in charge of taxation and the central officials colluded to obtain benefits together. For example, a county can collect 5 taels to 8 taels of tax money, but the amount sent to the central government may be less than 5000 taels.

Just this has to be exploited by the little ghosts along the way.

Where can this country's treasury get better?

Possibly, someone will ask again, why can a whipping method and spreading the income into the mother be accepted?
Aren't they also using the feudal dynasty's taxation system, allowing lower-level officials to collect taxes?
In fact, this is where the cleverness of spreading a piece of land into a mu and a single whip is.

They don't collect taxes from house to house at all, they directly measure the land, and then allocate it to each province. How much land is there in this province, then I have to pay so much land tax this year.

Whoever owns more land pays more tax, and whoever owns less land pays less tax.

In this way, the income of the country can be guaranteed.

Of course, the consequences of collecting taxes based on land were also very obvious in the late Qing Dynasty.

That is, the oppression of the peasants by the landlord class has reached a tragic level.

So if you want to count on the people to be good, and everyone can feel upright and upright, that is nothing to think about.

The only thing that can lead the country forward is only one - to develop productive forces!

How important productivity is, I won't repeat it here.

All in all, it is necessary to mobilize a group of officials who are proficient in mathematics and have received political education, and let them serve as the first batch of officials of the tax bureau.

The road at the beginning must be troublesome and chaotic, but as long as you can cross the river by feeling the stones and get out smoothly, those who come later can follow the road of the former.

And Zhu Yuanzhang was also very interested after listening to Zhu Qi talking about his tax bureau plans one by one.

Zhu Yuanzhang originally wanted to deal with corrupt officials, so the only way he could do was beheading and skinning.

But for other methods, it is estimated that there is only such a big and empty thing as teaching it with the words of a sage.

However, the "regulation by system" mentioned by Zhu Qi is, on the contrary, a path that Zhu Yuanzhang agrees with very much.

Zhu Yuanzhang is very fond of formulating new systems. For example, the household registration system, the distinction between military land and civilian land, etc., are all Zhu Yuanzhang's innovations.

Because Zhu Yuanzhang's goal is to establish a system that future generations can use forever.

In fact, this idea is good, but it is not realistic.

However, Zhu Qi didn't say much. After all, it was not something he needed to do to discourage Zhu Yuanzhang's enthusiasm.

After Zhu Yuanzhang finished listening to Zhu Qi's report, he immediately clapped his hands and said to Zhu Qi:

"Third brother, the idea of ​​the tax bureau you mentioned is really in line with what I want, so I will leave it to you to run the tax bureau in this way."

Zhu Qi rolled his eyes, knowing that this matter must still fall on his own head.

But if you don't do it yourself, no one else can.

He quickly handed over the task.

And Zhu Yuanzhang suddenly remembered something, and said to Zhu Qi:

"By the way, I heard that those students of yours are the main force in calculating taxes in various places this time.

Since they are so capable, let them form the tax bureau. "

Zhu Qi was overjoyed, this is what he thought, but he still showed a hesitant expression on his face, and said to Zhu Yuanzhang:
"Ah, this may not be appropriate, Father. After all, other officials are admitted through the imperial examination, and these students have not yet taken the exam."

Zhu Yuanzhang patted his legs and said:

"It's time for the country to employ people, and I don't know how many corrupt officials will be killed in this empty printing case.

The Ministry of Officials will definitely not be able to find anyone to form the tax bureau for a while, so I think it's quite appropriate for them to come!

As for the issue of birth, did all of us Jinyiwei pass the imperial examination?

Third child, you also said that the tax bureau will be directly responsible to me, the emperor, so I will personally appoint them, and they will be fine. "

Zhu Yuanzhang has said so, it is really more useful than anything else, even the prince needn't say anything, Zhu Qi directly took Zhu Yuanzhang's token and went down to start working.

But those students didn't know that after a few days of reckoning in the big room arranged by His Royal Highness King Liao, he turned into an emperor's pro-army like a royal guard.

However, they are not in charge of honor guards or guards, but in charge of collecting taxes for the emperor!

Needless to say, following our Highness the King of Liao, it is such a face-to-face!
(End of this chapter)