Why Does the Purpose of Tax Expenditures Reporting Matter?
If it is accepted that developing some form of TES complies with an accepted norm of good governance and is therefore in the public interest,[58] it is necessary to determine how we should proceed given the absence of a normative standpoint which can claim absolute truth. For the purposes of this article I am happy to accept the essentially postmodernist proposition that any normative standpoint will suffer from some destabilising element. But this is not to say that normative claims about social constructs such as a taxation system ought be denied. Rather, it means that a tax system should be assessed from alternative normative standpoints and an admittedly contingent vision of a tax system adopted. In the context of TES, I have already noted that proponents of alternative visions of tax expenditures reporting agree that the governance norm of transparency underpins the need for such reporting. However, the literature also suggests that alternative visions of the nature and contents o
