Uwarunkowania prawne funkcjonowania podatków i systemów podatkowych w krajach Unii Europejskiej – zarys zagadnienia

Abstract

Taxes constitute the main source of budget revenue. Therefore, they have a significant impact on the functioning and a state of a public finance. Thus, a creation of the most transparent and efficient system of tax collection is fundamental to a fiscal policy, including a tax policy. The aim of the article is to discuss legal implications of taxes and tax systems. The issues of concern, includes harmonisation of taxes in the European Union. Moreover, the article attempts to draw attention to the types of taxes imposed by the EU countries in order to present discrepancies between these countries, including the Eurozone countries, in which the process of unification of taxes advanced to the greatest extent. EU legislation is constantly evolving owing to, among others, the EU’s enlargement, a development of technologies or geopolitical background of the individual EU countries. Hence, the EU countries are required to constantly adjust their national legislations(by e.g. making it more specific), because the EU directives are indicators to make changes in national laws. Moreover, despite the fact that the EU aims at unification of tax systems in its countries, differences in the tax scales and tax rates can still be noticed. Simultaneously, categorisation of taxes which are functioning in the EU countries, including the Eurozone counties, shows some discrepancies between taxes. This concerns in particular an extend of an impact of taxes relating to social insurance on the revenue of a government and self-government institutions. The average level of share of these categories of taxes for the Eurozone countries (it amounted to 37.1%) and it was 4 percentage points higher than for the EU-28 countries. On the other hand, capital taxes played marginal roles in relation to other tax categories, 0.7% in the EU-28 countries and 0.8% in the euro area respectively.