The Taxpayer as Addressee of Tax Laws

As tax management by the administration increasingly assumes a successive, occasional, and supervisory character, the assessment of taxes is primarily entrusted to taxpayers. This is made possible by a tax procedure structured around a self-assessment system that allows for a certain degree of private fiscal risk management, with subsequent procedures focused on the administration's duty to uncover the material occurrence of taxable events.

Thus, companies draw up their commercial balance sheets, calculate taxable profit, assess the tax due, communicate it to the administration and deliver it to the State treasury through various forms of advance payment, often without any intervention from the administration. Additionally, they also act as peripheral services of the administration, withholding at source various taxes related to the operations in which they intervene: they withhold income tax on wages paid to their employees, assess VAT on the sale of goods and provision of services which, after deducting the VAT borne on purchases, they deliver to the State treasury. They also assess the stamp duty due on their operations and property taxes relating to vehicles and real estate they own. With taxes almost always paid in advance, the reimbursement of prepaid amounts by the taxpayer now becomes the rule. With the increasing complexity of returns to be submitted, these reimbursements tend to increase or decrease depending on the taxpayers' familiarity with those returns and with the tax laws they are required to comply with.

In addition to reducing the costs inherent to the tax assessment and collection system, freeing up resources for the inspection of suspicious cases, this greater accountability of individuals has led, as observed in the American system, to the recognition of the compliant taxpayer's right to be taxed according to their own return. This contributes to reducing excessive administrative interference with the compliant citizen. More than a condition for the system's effectiveness, the self-assessment of taxable income by individuals allows for a more effective protection of their rights, with greater determinability and predictability of tax law, providing all the necessary coordinates for the calculation of tax due in a way that favours voluntary compliance without the need for administrative intermediation. This is done with the reinforced certainty that, as long as the taxpayer continues to spontaneously fulfil their main and ancillary tax obligations, they will not be subject to unjustified controls by the administration.

Consequently, the correct application of tax law becomes increasingly a task and a right of the taxpayer, implying a shift of the administration's authoritative intervention to cases where controversy remains within the tax legal relationship. This paradigm shift, by requiring that the normal application of tax law be carried out less by specialists and more by the taxpayer themselves, further requires that the legislator adjust the content of tax laws to their generalised application and endow them with greater demands for clarity and internal coherence. The aim is thus to ensure that the exponential increase in the number of individuals applying tax rules does not lead to a corresponding increase in the interpretations given to legal texts.

A paradigm that is today under the unbearable pressures of the new economy and the (still ongoing) transmutation of modern fiscal states into debtor states.