The Family as Tax Dodge: Partnership, Individuality, and Gender in the Personal Income Tax Act, 1942 to 1970

Abstract

To pay for the Second World War, the federal government had to tax more Canadians more heavily. In 1942, the amount of tax-exempt personal income was reduced and the rates of taxation were increased. The public responded with perplexity and concern about how the newly taxable, often low-income Canadians were going to pay their taxes. In these protests, and over the course of the next thirty years, the treatment in tax law of individuals as members of families was a focus of debate and changing legal accommodation. Issues such as alimony, family maintenance payments, dependants' deductions, and family businesses presented the tax authorities with puzzles about how to collect an adequate public revenue in ways consistent with common sense beliefs about family relationships. The problem remains unsolved in income tax law because there are conflicting beliefs about and interests at stake in the economic and social meanings of family relationships.

Evidencia empírica de la cultura fiscal en los comerciantes del mercado popular de Montería-Colombia

“…From the anthropological explanation of the framework of social organization that incorporates conflict in its reproduction of the relationships of individuals to the order of the world, the tax culture is institutionalized by a perception of reality by people. Tax culture is defined as a construction of the realities of the community and the way in which citizens perceive the proper use of public resources, leading them to the ethical need to contribute to the growth of society (Costilla, 2010) (Tillotson, 2009;Hernández Fernández, 2011).…”