Distribution of land ownership and use in the rural Byzantine Empire was definitely not even. By the eleventh century, there are some very powerful large-scale landholders (including monasteries, although at least in urban areas, sometimes even a monastery was controlled by an aristocrat), a few small landowners hanging in there, and then most of the population would have been paroikoi or dependent peasants: tenant farmers.
For the powerful landowners, including monasteries, tax collection was mostly a game of tax evasion. Tax collectors remained a popular bogeyman of Byzantine literature and art as they had been in Roman times, and this hostility was mirrored by practice. Owners might work to avoid periodic visits by imperial tax assessors to revaluate their land at a higher tax amount, pay their taxes using a debased currency, or send someone chasing after a tax collector to steal back the money. (Anna Komnene tells a similar story in her Alexiad.)
Most Byzantine people, however, were peasants who were responsible for paying their taxes (a) collectively and (b) often indirectly. The tenant farmers paid most of their tax burden to the owner of their land. In a case like that, they would presumably be fairly familiar with the people involved. Otherwise, taxes were levied collectively on a village. This had the advantage, for the peasants, of helping out if one family had a rough year. It had the disadvantage of--one of the reasons for this system--that local land abandoned or unfarmed was still part of the total levy for an area. So people had to cover for each other. But tax evasion was at least sometimes practiced by peasants--or at least, financial documents complain about peasants who simply disappear when they know a tax collector is in the area!
As for identifying the tax collectors themselves: at least some tax officials, most prominently the kommerkiarioi (who, as their name indicates, were involved with regulating commerce), had official imperial seals. This Google Books preview shows a couple of them, although they are both ninth century. Seals were pretty serious business in medieval Europe. The collective payment and indirect payment methods certainly suggest that at least some of the people involved would have been able to recognize the seal for what it was (medieval peasants are, as a rule, stereotyped in contemporary sources as stupid, but at least from later legal sources we can see a good deal of ability to negotiate successfully the demands of a more literate and educated "elite" culture).
I can help with a couple components of your question, but not all, I'm afraid. Do you mean a farmer working on an estate or the man who owned it?
This is a PDF extract from The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century. You'll want to look around pages 991-993, under Administrative Structures, but here are the basics:
Administration was concentrated in Constantinople, with an extensive hierarchy. Provincial offices were replete with scores of officials whose names varied by their duties. Messengers called mandatores would have communicated between offices and estate owners, so everyone knew the rate, and when and whom they could expect to come collect. Additionally, state-owned estates would have managers to ensure things ran smoothly.
Each office would bear its own seal. For the seals, themselves, this text references Le corpus des sceaux de l'empire byzantin. You don't need to read French to understand the basic designations of office, nor view the seals, themselves. They do come with handy little notes, though. If an "official" did not bear the recognized seal, they would probably be sent back empty-handed. The source I provided gives us no recourse on the matter of being cheated. From its perspective, the bureaucracy appears thick enough to resist thievery and impersonation on a large scale.
Also, local tax positions could be bought for small fortunes (could be, not ubiquitously) and salaries were paid out of taxes collected. In the provinces these positions were coveted. It was a good enough deal for both official and government; they were mutually invested in ensuring collection.
There's a heck of a lot more, and fortunately the writing isn't as dry as it could be, so give it a read and see if it helps!