The Institute of self-declaration was introduced into the Slovenian legislation according to similar practices from foreign countries as a mechanism that benefits not only taxpayers by enabling them to additionally fulfill their tax obligations in the case of overlooked tax debt, but also the state, who can focus its control on other, purposely neglectful taxpayers.
One form of tax control is tax inspection (DIN) where due to limited supervision resources at the Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia (FURS), the Tax Procedure Act introduces new forms of self-declaration such as the submission of VAT returns after issuing the inspection register, with the aim of increase in general government revenues. Within my master's thesis, I analyzed the Institute of self-declaration according to the existing legislation and the scientific literature, as well as the statistical data and administrative case-law in this field. The main research objective was to specify the impact of self-declarations on DIN and other forms of control, particularly in terms of fewer procedures and burdens on FURS and the increase in general government revenues. With the help of the normative and comparative analysis–specifically in Austria–and a secondary review of scientific source material, I presented the benefits of self-declaration for the state or the taxpayers, and also some systematic outstanding issues. The results of the empirical research showed through the analysis of annual reports, structured interviews with FURS and tax advisors, and the analysis of case law on self-declarations, how the total number of self-declarations and their financial impact are increasing, and the number of tax inspections are decreasing while simultaneously the general government revenues are increasing.
The results are useful as a contribution to the science of administrative law. The usefulness of the work is demonstrated mainly in a targeted analysis through the comparison between theory and practice of recent years, the consequential proposals of legislation improvement and a consistently systematic conduct of the tax authorities in the future.
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