Tax fairness in Canadian government budgets: How fair is ‘fair’?

This paper analyzes how accounting information is used in the presentation of the tax fairness construct in Canadian government budgets from 1997 to 2000. The paper adopts a sociological approach to understanding budgeting, and integrates the theoretical basis for fairness into the analysis. It builds on a stream of accounting and public policy literature that suggests that governments may be promoting tax fairness in part to induce trust and improve the social norm of tax compliance. Tax fairness in these budgets is targeted towards the majority of lower income taxpayers. For these taxpayers only, these budgets create perceptions of fairness by eliciting referent cognitions for past tax outcomes. Tax fairness is generally not perceived as “fair” for a minority of higher income taxpayers. Thus, what accounting purports to do, and what it is perceived to do, are not necessarily identical.