Legislating Unorthodox Taxes: The Hungarian Experience

To date, a series of non-traditional schemes have proliferated in the area of tax law, challenging the widely accepted principles of tax legislation. Lump-sum or presumptive taxes, redemption fees or tax amnesty, corrective taxes (bank levies), or confiscatory taxes (e.g., banker bonuses) can hardly be reconciled with the hard core of tax legislation that is established on the principles of equality and legal certainty. The present paper discusses these unorthodox types of public charges.