Official explanations of fiscal bodies about the certainty of taxation

The principle of certainty of taxation is a branch development of a General legal formal requirement of certainty of law. A certain nature of the tax rule guarantees its correct understanding, interpretation and application. The uncertain, ambiguous and fragmented tax and legal regulation is a problem and the efforts of scientists, legislators, judges and practicing lawyers are aimed at its solution. The task is to develop effective tools to reduce the overall level of uncertainty in tax law. The acts of official interpretation issued by the fiscal authorities to clarify the meaning of tax laws and their application represent one of such tools. The principles of competence and rule of law demand to identify clearly the public authority to which the law delegates the right to give official explanations. Unfortunately, in practice, there is still the problem of duplication of this function by the Ministry of finance and its structures on the one hand, and on the other hand, by the tax authorities headed by the Federal Tax Service of Russia. The procedure of publication of official clarification by fiscal authorities is specified in the current legislation very sparingly. It is necessary to describe in detail in the standards of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation the division of competences between financial and tax authorities in the considered sphere, terms and procedures of the publication of acts - interpretations, their forms and structure, hierarchy, rules of publication and temporal action, etc. The main problem is the identification of the legal nature of official explanations. Some authors recognize them as the specific sources of tax law, endowing them with quality of normalization and obligation, others reject a "standard" approach, relating the latter to the acts of casual interpretation and still others take an intermediate position, specifying various test criteria, which can give an obligatory (standard) nature to the documents under consideration. It is expedient to resort to the principle of "a priority of substance over form". To establish the standard nature of the Act it is necessary to be guided not by the set of its formal signs (the name, requisites, state registration, publication), but by its semantic content. The general rule about a recommendatory, i.e. legally non-binding nature of the official explanations can have essential exceptions. A part of such acts may contain the tax rules concretizing tax laws (may be not de jure but de facto). Such acts are admissible to be considered as supplementary sources of tax law The subject of official clarification is the content of tax rules and their application. The law allows only the interpretation of the tax rules, but not the analysis of concrete situations. For the purpose of providing a taxpayer with an opportunity to obtain information on the tax consequences of transactions which he just plans to make, it is offered to establish the institute of an advance tax ruling.

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