Decentralization of power, currently underway in Ukraine, has launched a reform of the whole State. However, society has not yet elaborated an appropriate strategy for this reform, and it has not yet reliably defined what kind of a State it de facto has now. Important knowledge about this State can be derived from the analysis of its tax-law nature. All in all, as provided for by one of the common theories of the State, it is taxes that embody its economically expressed existence. The article focuses primarily on the analysis of the legal nature of Ukraine as a modern fiscal State.

The purpose of the article is to highlight the most common causes and regularities through which this State has emerged, as well as its main goals and legal properties.

The subject matter, goal and objectives of the research have defined the methodology of the article, in particular, the anthroposociocultural approach.

Based on the analysis of the causes and regularities through which the Ukrainian Fiscal State has emerged, and of its legal properties, the author comes to the following conclusions: fiscal State is a qualitatively distinguished type of tax State. Its emergence is not rigidly pegged to a particular type of civilization or socio-economic formation. It emerges as a result of deformation and transformation, via a set of specific historical causes, of true public-law values into the values of quasi-public law. The latter find their external manifestation most commonly in the form of “State” values. The fundamental goals and means of achieving them in the tax and the fiscal States are also radically different. While in the first case, the tax State itself is the main means by which the tax policy is implemented, and taxpayers with their needs act as the values and objectives of this State (this is why in the XX–XXI centuries such a State was referred to as the social State), in the fiscal State taxpayers and the State itself has opposing roles to play. Ukraine as a fiscal State is no exception. The prerequisites for its emergence were formed mainly in the bosom of Soviet society and matured in the initial post-Soviet period of Ukraine’s development. It has the following inherent legal properties: seizure by the State of the tax law of taxpayers and society on the whole; fiscal sovereignty of the State; coercive nature of tax liability which taxpayers have to the fiscal State; fiscal nature of its tax law; asymmetry of tax law of the fiscal State.

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Thesis

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