Tax statute of limitations in dispute: taxpayer guarantees and tax authority powers - criteria of the Constitutional court, Judiciary, Tax court, and the legislature
Keywords:
Tax prescription, Suspension of the statute of limitations, Legal certainty, Administrative tax dispute procedure, Constitucional Court, Supreme Court, Tax CourtAbstract
Extinctive prescription in tax matters constitutes one of the main mechanisms for safeguarding legal certainty, as it establishes temporal limits on the exercise of the Tax Administration’s powers of assessment, collection, and sanctioning. However, the amendments introduced by Legislative Decrees 981 and 1311 to Article 46 of the Tax Code have given rise to significant interpretive controversies regarding the scope of the statute of limitations during the proceedings before the Tax Court and the judicial review proceedings in tax matters.
This paper examines the regulatory and jurisprudential evolution of these amendments, with particular emphasis on the differences among the approaches developed by the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, and the Tax Court concerning the degree of protection afforded to taxpayers. In doing so, it highlights the tensions among these approaches and their effects on legal certainty and the predictability of the tax system.
On this basis, the paper argues that the grounds for suspending the statute of limitations must be interpreted in accordance with constitutional principles, so that delays attributable to administrative bodies or the annulment of administrative acts do not result in an indefinite extension of the Tax Administration’s powers.
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