On 11 January 2011, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Yemen rejected a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Taxation Law No. 19, thus legally establishing the General Sales Tax (GST) and overcoming the last apparent barrier to its implementation. In the shadow of popular struggles across the Middle East, including Yemen, this decision nonetheless represents the nadir of ten years of resistance to taxation reform – encompassing demonstrations, strikes, consumer petitions, denunciatory religious opinions, and numerous legal challenges – begun in 2001 under the aegis of World Bank and IMF-mandated structural adjustment program. Following predictions that the exploitation of Yemen’s oil reserves will cease to be economically viable by 2017, the acceleration of these reforms heralds a renewed effort to reconfigure not only the fiscal regulatory institutions, and hence the material foundations, of the state, but also the forms in which state authority and political identity are contingently manifest. This paper examines an experimental World Bank taxation reform program operating within the newly reconstituted Tax Authority of the Republic of Yemen. Applying an ethnographic perspective, it argues that these reforms are not merely concerned with revenue generation (or surplus appropriation) by the state. Through an exploration of the everyday interactions of state agents with World Bank advisors, on the one hand, and taxpayers, on the other, I contend that they also implicate the production of governable and self-governing citizen-subjects. This paper makes three further assertions in connection with recent academic literature. The first maintains that ‘globalized’ institutions, such as the World Bank and IMF, do not necessarily undermine the state and its sovereign power, but restructure them in ways congruent with neoliberal logics. This recognizes recent political economy scholarship that has examined the centrality of national institutions for regulating and facilitating the transnational flow of people, commodities, and capital. The second posits that rather than accepting sovereign power as self-evident, we should examine how claims to authoritative status and unqualified jurisdiction both become normative and are resisted. Hence, I reference anthropological work on value and moral economies to consider the incoherence between norms of legality and legitimacy. The third challenges a body of work which characterizes the neoliberal project as a shift away from disciplinary forms of power to governmental techniques of rule and argues that these two forms of power are co-constitutive, and that a focus on taxation reform in Yemen reveals the interdependence of repression and law with self-governance.