Chen Shuhao was originally a small county magistrate.

Just like most other grassroots officials, when reporting taxes every year, he would always ask the county magistrate to go to the Ministry of Revenue to report taxes with empty documents printed with the government seal.

How much data is written in this official document depends on the data calculated by the Ministry of Revenue.

Then fill in and it's done.

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

But empty seal documents have become an unwritten habit in the officialdom, so Chen Shuhao naturally would not seriously count the tax situation under his jurisdiction.

It is better to be simpler.

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

This is the same as being an official in the officialdom. If you don’t do what others do, then aren’t you very unsociable?

At the beginning, Chen Shuhao also handled tax matters respectfully, and paid the excess taxes to the top.

However, once when I was having dinner with the prefect above, I was inspired by people next to me.

It is natural to pay a little extra tax on it, but you should keep some of it yourself.

Chen Shuhao was naturally unhappy at the beginning, and even said righteously that he had to be honest and upright as an official.

However, as time goes by, looking at the colleagues around you, you will get some fuel from these empty seal documents from time to time.

Chen Shuhao naturally couldn't help it.

It happened that there was something at home that needed to rush to use money, so Chen Shuhao looked at the remaining money and food on hand.

The silver verified by the Ministry of Revenue has been handed over, and the rest of the things are really something that no one cares about.

Even if I hand it over to the prefect, the superiors may not necessarily hand it over to the court. It would be better to take it down and respond to the emergency. This is nothing.

Thinking of this, Chen Shuhao deducted hundreds of taels from the silver ounce and used it for emergency use.

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

This time, even Chen Shuhao felt nothing was wrong.

After all, the court never had any intention of inquiries.

But I didn't expect that the air seal case would explode so rapidly this time.

But most of the unlucky ones were officials of the court's Ministry of Revenue. Most of the local officials, as far as Chen Shuhao knew, were not yet questioned or arrested by the court.

But what Chen Shuhao didn't know was that the reason why the court had not captured them was because the internal investigation was still underway.

After the investigation was completed, the Jinyiwei soon found Chen Shuhao.

When the Jinyiwei came over and knocked on the door and took him away, Chen Shuhao quickly understood what was for.

He was in an instant and lost his courage.

However, I still insisted on not being willing to confess my crimes, after all, the court had no evidence.

And my blank documents are like others. So many people use empty seals, so they won’t be punished all of them, right?

What's more, there is no evidence!

With this idea, Chen Shuhao didn't speak even after a few beats, until the Jinyiwei spread the account book in front of Chen Shuhao.

Facing the account book, Chen Shuhao also gritted his teeth.

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

The Jinyiwei had actually expected that officials like Chen Shuhao would use such reasons to relieve themselves of their crimes.

However, there is a book that His Highness the King of Liao calculated, and it is clear at a glance what is wrong.

For example, the taxes in the county under Chen Shuhao's jurisdiction are inconsistent with the taxes in the cap taxes of the Central Ministry of Revenue.

Then go to the county town to visit it and see how many families there are.

As long as the local taxation is determined, the actual cap tax is more than the one in the yellow book of the Central Ministry of Revenue. Isn’t the remaining money Chen Shuhao gave me greed?

This is the most serious evidence. Even if Chen Shuhao has ten thousand reasons, he cannot escape the blame.

And of course, the Jinyiwei did these things in advance.

When all the data and evidence were placed in front of Chen Shuhao, he had no confidence.

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

And none of these hundreds of people was wronged. As long as the tax gap was more than 10%, they were embezzled.

Zhu Qi's method is simply accurate to every county town.

There are many rioters waiting to be interrogated one by one.

While arresting those corrupt officials to the greatest extent, they can also recover the country's property from their mouths.

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

After all, the money these corrupt officials have not been recovered, and the actual losses are real.

Besides, these corrupt officials are all ready-made laborers.

Those who embezzle too much will definitely be beheaded to serve as a warning to others.

And those who are not particularly corrupt are not necessary to kill them all.

They can completely use waste and use it as a coolie. It is very labor-intensive to reclaim land on this frontier.

Isn’t this a good thing to ask them to cut down trees and clear up wasteland and then distribute the land to the people?

Those who are officials must serve the people.

After seeing so many tangible achievements Zhu Yuanzhang had obtained after seeing Zhu Qi's investigation of the empty seal case, he was in a great mood.

On the one hand, we obtained real evidence to catch corrupt officials, and on the other hand, it was because the country recovered a large amount of stolen money.

If Zhu Qi's account book was not used as evidence, it would be really a question whether the stolen money could be recovered.

Zhu Qi also began to express his opinion by taking advantage of Zhu Yuanzhang's good mood.

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

There is no need to say more about embezzling more than one thousand taels of beheading.

Those who embezzle less than one thousand taels of corruption are divided into five years, ten years, twenty years and lifelong labor according to the number.

For these local officials, most of them are still in their 30s and have no problem working for 20 years in prison.

For those officials of the Central Ministry of Revenue who made the case, they were all over forty or fifty years. There was actually no big difference between these officials for 20 years and lifelong labor.

If you can collude with local officials in the Ministry of Revenue to commit crimes, the value of corruption is definitely not small. Even if it is less than one thousand taels, it is enough to sentence lifelong labor.

In addition to using these criminal officials as labor and sent them to the frontier to reclaim land, there is another most important strategy, which is to improve the current tax institutions of the Ming Dynasty.

The facts of the empty seal case have proved that the local officials in Ming Dynasty were really poor in taxation.

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

Especially after the Tang Dynasty and during the Song Dynasty, there were still developed commercial activities and perfect commercial tax support.

The country can receive a lot of money from merchants every year when doing business on its own. After the Song Dynasty, mathematics basically stagnated or even regressed, and Confucian scholars could not learn mathematics at all.

There is no mathematics in the imperial examination, and it all takes the Four Books and Five Classics.

How many mathematical attainments can officials selected in this way expect them to have?

As for taxation, it is not to mention how sensitive you are to numbers, but at least you must be very familiar with and very careful in order to undertake tax work.

When modern countries recruit civil servants, the tax bureaus at least have professional requirements.

So the first thing is to separate the tax functions from the current officials, and no longer let the migrant officials and the Central Ministry of Revenue take charge of taxation.

On the one hand, they are unprofessional, and on the other hand, they are both athletes and referees. I hope they can be conscious?

Establish a new institution - the Taxation Bureau!

Moreover, this tax bureau should be directly responsible for the emperor like the Jinyiwei, rather than obeying the orders of the three provinces and six ministries.

Why has the Jinyiwei always had trouble with officials?

That's because of these, because they are not in the same system as officials at all.

I can't even see each other on weekdays, let alone get to know each other.

Can this develop any relationship?

Moreover, the Jinyiwei also specifically investigates the evidence of criminal crimes by officials. He is born like cats and mice, so his relationship is naturally not much better.

The tax bureau also needs to arrange it to go to the opposite side of local officials like the Jinyiwei.

The modern tax bureau is a very suitable template.

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

Someone may ask, why not just ask the tax bureau officials to collect taxes and statistics?

Wouldn’t it be a waste of manpower and cause work troubles in separate actions like this?
To be continued...