Payments due to the state are in a slightly different position. The maximum amount due is set by statute or statutory instilment, but the officials responsible for collecting the money tax inspectors and tax and social security fraud investigators) typically have discretion to relieve those subject to the charges of some part of the amount due. Sometimes these remissions are formalized in administrative rules, such as the UK Inland Revenue’s published extra-statutory concessions which are treated just as if they were binding rules of law. In other contexts, they are the subject of negotiation in individual cases: penalties or other payments may be staggered, or remitted in whole or in pan, on the grounds of hardship, or because insisting on the full payment at once would drive the payer into insolvency and make it more or less impossible to recover any substantial amount, or as an incentive for a payer to provide information about other activities or other people. In these investigative settings, the relationship between the legal rules and the behavior of officials is far more like that between regulators and the regulated, described above. Negotiations take place against the background of the often draconian legal powers which officials would in practice find it counter-productive to use to the full.