One of the most powerful persons in Slothjemia is the Lord High Chancellor, charged with collecting taxes and keeping an eye on the expenditures for the realm. Gathering up the taxes owed to the Crown is a monumental task in and of itself, and requires a lot of energy and attention. The Office of the Chancellery has a very large staff in order to attend to all of its many obligations. There is a Lord Chancellor assigned to each Grafdom, and beneath them are High Chancellors and Chancellors that do most of the work in individual duchies and counties, respectfully.

Within the Office of the Chancellery is the subordinate Office of the Lord Revenuer that determines how much everyone owes in taxes every season. Probably less popular than the people that actually collect the taxes the assessors in the Office of the Lord Revenuer are never welcomed with open arms on the estates of the nobles nor in the private businesses of the realm.

Because taxes are collected directly from landed nobility, and not through a “trickle-up” process through layers of feudal lieges, there must be more accountants to insure that the Crown is getting every copper piece that it is due. There is a small army of dedicated guards for these royal bookkeepers, called the Chancellery Guard, but their jurisdiction is limited solely to protecting tax shipments and investigating counterfeit coinage. They work closely with rural and urban constables when carrying out their duties, and while they are heavily armed and well-trained, they rely heavily on regular law enforcement when things get ugly.

Controlling the purse strings of the kingdom makes the Lord High Chancellor a profoundly influential person. The Empress, of course, can force a decision favorable to her that will trump anything the Lord High Chancellor wants to do, but the circumstances would have to be extreme for this to occur. Rarely does the Lord High Chancellor venture out of the capital, and when they do, it is because they are accompanying the Empress when she leaves. Slothjemian rulers have historically given their chancellors discretion according to the whims of said rulers. Some have demanded that every transaction be signed off on by the Crown, and others haven’t expressed much interest at all in how much gets spent. Reichsha is not one of those “hands off” sorts of rulers, though. With her husband, the Herzgraf, keeping an eye on all things military related, she is free to keep a close eye on how her country is spending its money. While this has limited the power of her Lord High Chancellor, it has by no means made them redundant.