The subject of the research is the collisions between the presumptions of public and private law in relation to tax legal relations. The legal nature of the presumption of taxpayer good faith is analyzed, its genesis in constitutional legal doctrine and judicial practice, as well as its correlation with the principles of public legal regulation. Institutional contradictions arising from the simultaneous application of private law and public law presumptions in the field of taxation are identified, including in the context of Article 54.1 of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation. The possibility of applying the principle of estoppel in tax legal relations is considered. An analysis of the judicial practice of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation is conducted from the perspective of forming and developing a legal position on the balance of public and private interests, as well as resolving inter-sectoral conflicts. Dialectical and formal-legal, comparative-legal, and systemic analyses of the judicial practice of arbitration courts and general jurisdiction courts, as well as doctrinal approaches, are carried out. The main conclusion of the research is the establishment of the objective nature of the conflict of presumptions, determined by the inter-sectoral character of tax law. The work formulates an approach to the presumption of taxpayer good faith as a phenomenon of “transnormative reception”: the private law construct is adapted to the public law environment; however, this adaptation is not methodologically flawless, leading to systemic contradictions in law enforcement. Article 54.1 of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation only partially resolved the conflict of presumptions, legislatively enshrining a number of previously formulated judicial positions, but did not create an independent public legal concept of taxpayer behavior standards. A promising direction in doctrine is proposed – the development of a special tax legal theory of presumptions based on the constitutional principles of proportionality, legal certainty, and protection of legitimate expectations. The direct enshrinement in the Tax Code of the Russian Federation of the concept of the “reasonable taxpayer standard” as a public law analogue of the “bona fide participant in civil turnover” standard is suggested, which would eliminate the methodological dependence of tax law on private law constructs and create an independent toolkit for assessing the behavior of subjects of tax legal relations.
Maiia Mikhailovna Savchenko (Thu,) studied this question.