Taxpayers rights and individual application to the Constitutional Court

The right of individual application to the Constitutional Court is a legal remedy that taxpayers who claim that the fundamental rights and freedoms enumerated in the ECHR and guaranteed by the Constitution have been violated due to an act, procedure, or neglect of any public body, which is accepted by Law No. 6216 and has been applied since 23/09/2012. To use this method, the taxpayers have exhausted the administrative and legal remedies such as judicial remedies, and the decisions taken by these authorities should not meet the claims of violation of rights. Therefore, the individual application to the Constitutional Court is an exceptional and subsidiary legal remedy. The purpose of this study is to examine the tax-related applications in terms of rights, intervention claims, results, and remedies, and to shed light on the resolution of possible disputes in administrative and judicial solutions without transferring them to the Constitutional Court. In this direction, the first part of the study examined taxpayer rights regarding fundamental rights and freedoms. In the second part, the reasons for tax disputes and ways of protecting taxpayer rights in resolving tax disputes are examined. In the third part, the decisions regarding protecting taxpayer rights and freedoms through the individual application are evaluated. One hundred twenty-two individual applications on tax issues submitted between 2012 and 2019 were reviewed by document review and content analysis by the case study method. In the second and third parts of the study, out of 122 judgements, those that created of could create court practices are qualitatively examined in detail. Besides, all legal decisions were quantitatively analyzed with frequency analysis. Although the individual application to the Constitutional Court has reduced the number of files related to individual applications to the ECHR, in the resolution of tax disputes; Regulations such as simplifying the tax legislation, basing the essential points of tax regulations on the law, eliminating the conflicts between the provisions of the legislation, observing the taxpayer rights by the tax administration, and reducing the workload of the judicial bodies will make the process more effective.