A few years ago I read an article that argued that one of the best ways to help many African countries would be to send accountants and help set up a cadastre.
> a register of property showing the extent, value, and ownership of land for taxation.
I remember watching a documentary where they reproduced his experiment. Essentially, send a team of students in each country on a mission : create a company. I've done it in the UK, it's one day and 70 pounds. In the documentary they showed the complexities for just the administrative act of "creating a company" in (I believe) Argentina. It took them 3 months.
[1] https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-succes...
In his research he found that the legal system around property was very ineffective for poor people and many developing countries. They followed real life cases trying to bring properties/businesses from the informal sector to being fully registered and taxed.
It was often a many year process and expensive. Owners would also have preferred to pay taxed when getting access to fully legal status, access to banking and capital markets an important one.
Findings where from places like Peru, Egypt, Philippines (if memory serves me), and contrasted with places like US, Germany, England, Sweden, and Japan. The latter mostly had a well structured, democratic system of property law and registries available to everyone, not just the wealthy or powerful.
Edit: Another key element was to open a process to convert squatted land into legal property. Many times formal land ownership was not conforming to lived reality, and some legal title nobody was interested in any longer was blocking legalization of actual use. US homesteading regulations are one example of how that was done, but all western countries mentioned earlier have or had equivalent processes.
the process: https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...
There's still lots of small property owners that are still poor that would prefer not paying taxes on their small holdings.
In practice though, people pay property tax on assessed value of buildings, but it’s not the same as land tax so an unfinished building can be counted as worthless depending on its state.
It actually argued for lots more bureaucracy, not accountants particularly. And for a cadastre / land registry. And indeed mentions Hernando de Soto's work in Peru and Egypt.
Unfortunately, if it's cultural (you owe your relatives any spare liquid capital you have) then I don't know how to fix it.
In fact, the police (and local politicians) are often present to contribute to the threat.