This thesis focuses on the study of institutionalization of the State Customs and Tax Service of Ukraine as a legal institute constituted by particular components, mechanisms, factors, parameters and conceptual foundations of its further development, which have been identified both in the light of its genesis and on the basis of the latest strategies of the existing legislation reforming, as well as successful experience of customs and tax administrations, in the framework of legislatively fixed directions of modernization and humanization of tax relations with due consideration of the principles of e-democracy, service philosophy, transparency, optimization of interaction between tax authorities and taxpayers, demilitarization of the tax system, functional approach to the SCTS’s structural modification and status-institutional roles’ distribution, tax discipline’s voluntariness and integrity, etc., in accordance with the priorities of national development and international standards.
It has been established that, regardless of available research in the field of SCTS’s institutional formation and development, the chosen issue remains relevant and needs further investigation in view of optimization and acceleration of the modernizing processes within the customs-tax system in recent years, with relation to the new conceptual priorities and mechanisms of legal regulation regarding the balance of SCTS’s fiscal and service functions, as well as the need to comply which the European integration and harmonization objectives embodied by the three-pronged goal «complicity-service-acceleration». These challenges necessitate a scientific rationale of new legal statuses, regimes, legal facts, new categories and concepts, most of which have appeared only recently as a result of SCTS’s transformational changes and urgently require scientific exploration.
The dissertation identifies five main stages of legal and organizational genesis of the customs and tax service of Ukraine as a legal institute, based on the social facet and legal-regulatory specifics of each of the periods.
On the basis of analysis of the specifics of formation, development and the most recent trends of the SCTS functioning as an institutional and legal unit, the research identifies, on the one hand, the parameters of SCTS institutional stability and, on the other hand, the determinants of its further evolutionary tranformation.
In the interdisciplinary discursive framework the dissertation explicates the normative meaning of the modernization-bound category of «transparency», realized by means of communicative-discursive strategies of dialogization, feedback, explication and interpretation, adaptation to the customers and civil society’s expectations, popularization, accountability to the client, client-driven etiquette of communicative behavior, etc., intended to optimize the discourse between tax authorities and taxpayers. In international framework «transparency» is provided by the strategies of legal certainty, predictability and the rapid delivery of the benefits of harmonised European standards.
The new propositions to the SCTS legislation have been advanced, including the specification of the notions of «income», «goodwill», «subjects of the tax legal relations», as well as enlargement of the actual SCTS law with the material and processual norms with regards to indirect methods of the tax audit, legal status of mediation as a «neutral» tool of the tax disputes resolving, possible means of the e- market taxation, determining the criteria of differentiating between the high technological goods and services.
Key words: legal institutionalization, state tax and customs service, genesis, modernization, transparency, service philosophy, humanization, international standards.
