Abstract

The purpose of this article is to offer an assessment of the standard notion of the tax obligation and to present it as a casuistic obligation derived from the tax legal relationship, which would be more compatible with the idea of citizenship and constitutional and democratic rule of law. The author believes the tax legal relationship would be better represented as pertaining to a statute that links the State with the citizen in terms of being liable for taxes, in general, and a taxpayer in particular, and is the main product of tax authority. The statute would give rise to various sorts of tax obligations. That the tax obligation is casuistic implies its content is specific and derives from certain operations of distinct nature and from institutional decisions. In the opinion of the author, the basis of the obligation would be found in all the rules of the system that are applicable to the case. Therefore, the tax obligation would be complex, systemic and dynamic. It must be distinguished entirely from the tax itself, which only affords an abstract content that is useful to specify the content of tax law and, therefore, the general construction that dogmatically supports the tax system.