A Challenging Scientific Path: The Academic Value of Taxpayer Rights for a Contemporary, Skilled and Comparative Law Education
Keywords:
Taxpayer, Rights/Obligations, Comparison, Education, Dignity, AccountabilityAbstract
Contemporary democracies are experiencing a never-ending fiscal and legal crisis, causing reductions in agencies’ budgets and having significant adverse effects, including the restriction of individual liberty, with the consequent restraint of personal ambitions and a weakening awareness of taxpayers’ rights (TRs). These developments result in the need for a new paradigm of comparative law: a constitutional taxpayer-centric approach. Admitting the crucial importance of the relationship between the State and citizens as the basic requirement for overcoming the inadequacies of the contemporary State, the proposed new theory reveals personal dignity to be a constitutional value with substantial normative effectiveness.
This paper presents the case for the undertaking of such an analysis being a current matter for academics and legal experts. The aim is to gradually reach a common legal understanding of the basic foundations of contemporary legal systems, including taxpayer rights as a tool of implementation of the comparative methodology.
An updated tool of fairness should be considered for its potential to support new models of education, even beyond tax administration. The final purpose is the achievement of cooperative and positive outcomes which are supported by the comparative method. That method has, in fact, already proved to be one of the most challenging scientific approaches providing significant evidence of improvements in terms of cooperation, productive dialogue, mutual gain and relevant implications, including operational changes and enhancement of cultural change, at both national and international levels.
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