Zutikov, I. A. The Balance of Interests between Tax Authorities and Taxpayers in the Russian Law

Abstract: The subject under review is the interaction between tax authorities and taxpayers in the process of performing tax obligations by taxpayers. Within the framework of the research the author offers his own term ‘balance of interests between tax authorities and taxpayers’. He defines it as the relation between mutually connected and balanced needs of the state in a taxpayer’s finances, on one hand, and desires and opportunities of a taxpayer to satisfy these needs, on the other hand, as well as the necessity to maintain this relation and balance within the legal framework. The author specifies the gaps in modern judicial method of resolution of conflicts between tax authorities and taxpayers including: 1) long period of dispute consideration; 2) the absence of sufficient regulatory system. The author also analyzes the problems of the process of conflict resolution including: 1) contradictions between the Tax Code of the Russian Federation and Civil Code of the Russian Federation; 2) conflicts between procedures in public law and private law; 3) possible establishment of administrative courts. In response to the aforesaid issues, the author offers the following solutions: to adopt a new codified procedural act at the legal level called Administrative Procedural Code and impose disciplinary and administrative responsibility on officials for committing tax violations that do not involve financial responsibility. The main research methods used in the article are: analytical method that allows to analyze the applicable legislation and judicial practice and comparative legal method that allows to compare the existing Russian and foreign legislations. The author provides the definition of his own term ‘balance of interests between tax authorities and taxpayers’ as ‘the relation between mutually connected and balanced needs of the state in a taxpayer’s finances, on one hand, and desires and opportunities of a taxpayer to satisfy these needs, on the other hand, as well as the necessity to maintain this relation and balance within the legal framework’ and offers to establish the public procedural legislation by the means of adopting the Administrative Procedural Code of the Russian Federation. The author also offers to impose administrative and disciplinary responsibility on tax officials for committing tax violations. The author shares his opinion that revenue procedures should be simplified for individual ‘good faith’ taxpayers and, on the contrary, a more complicated procedure for tax payment and calculation should be established for persistent non-payers so that tax authorities could better control their activities or even exclude such payers from the category of good faith taxpayers. Noteworthy that the decision to include these or those taxpayers into the category of good faith taxpayers or to exclude them from that category should be still made by the Federal Tax Service.

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