Tax legislation : standards, trends and challenges

This book is the result of the international conference Tax Legislation: Legal Standards, Trends, Challenges organized in October 2013 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Centre of Tax Documentation and Studies of the University of Łódź (Poland). The idea behind the conference and the book is to identify standards, trends and challenges in drafting, enacting and assessing tax legislation and to create a picture of the tax legislation in force in different countries. The contemporary legal research is focused mainly on the existing tax law and its application rather than on the legislative activities and their results (i.e. legislative instruments). Meanwhile, it is the course of the legislative process that directly influences the functioning of the tax system. The quality of tax legislation affects the entirety of tax relations: from the position of taxpayers and their attitude towards taxation to the efficacy of tax administration and the scale of tax litigation. The novelty of this book lies in its focus on the purely legal aspects of the tax law-making process and the evaluation of the resulting legislation against diverse, but rather formal than substantive, quality criteria. Identifying standards and contemporary challenges of tax legislation is a necessary step in a quest for creating better tax legislation, more suited to the needs of taxpayers and tax administration in the modern economy. This book gathers information on good practices and contemporary standards in tax law-making, provided by an international team of renowned authors. The publication is addressed to academics, doctoral candidates and students, as well as tax practitioners, including tax lawyers, tax advisors, tax officials and judges. It should be particularly interesting to tax legislators and tax policy makers, or more generally - to all officials involved in drafting and enacting tax legislation.