Extraordinary professor profile: Prof Chris Evans

Posted on May 03, 2021

The over-arching goal that permeates the research of Professor Chris Evans, an extraordinary professor in the Department of Taxation, is to explore, create and develop more citizen-centric approaches to the way in which the tax system of any country impacts upon its populations. Throughout his academic career in Australia and South Africa he has sought to discover new and better ways in which the interactions between the citizen (individual and corporate) and the state can be designed, implemented and moderated to ensure appropriate tax capacity is developed without unnecessary burdens being imposed on those who fund that capacity.
 
Prof Evans enjoys an international reputation for the quality of his research into tax compliance costs: the financial, time and other costs imposed upon persons as a result of complying with the tax system. He has led teams undertaking seminal research studies into the operating costs of taxation systems and developed innovative methodologies for the estimation of tax compliance costs. In addition, he has broadened the global analysis of such work through major reviews and through the leadership of multinational research collaborations designed to develop international comparative material in tax compliance costs research.
 
He is currently leading a multi-university project with one of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms, which is developing and implementing a set of diagnostic tools designed to measure the business tax compliance burden with a view to proposing measures that can reduce the burden in poorly performing countries. The first of these tools, evaluating the VAT burden, was rolled out to the 47 countries (including South Africa) which are members of the Forum on Tax Administration in 2018. The results were presented at the 5th OECD Global Tax Forum held in Melbourne, and at the KPMG Africa Tax Summit in Cape Town. Work is now progressing on three other diagnostic tools covering all other business tax compliance burdens and on extending the roll-out to many more countries.
 
This strand of compliance costs research has also developed significantly into the broader area of tax simplification, reflected in the award of a major (US$350,000) grant to another multi-university team led by Prof Evans and designed to assess and address tax system complexity. The work on this project involved empirical and legal research across six specific areas related to tax system complexity and has led to numerous primary and secondary research outputs, including the development of a world-first prototype of a tax system complexity index published in an A* journal (ABDC ranking of journals).
 
In 2018 he organized a two-day symposium entitled ‘Tax Simplification: An African Perspective’ in Pretoria. Prominent international speakers included John Whiting CBE, former Director of the Office of Tax Simplification in the UK; Nina Olson, the former National Taxpayer Advocate in the US; and Prof Judith Freedman from Oxford University. The papers from the symposium were refereed and many of them were published by Pretoria University Law Press as chapters in a book co-edited by Prof Evans titled Tax Simplification: An African Perspective.
 
This was the third in a series of symposia, all organized by Professor Evans and sponsored by the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants, designed to build international engagement for UP’s Department of Taxation and develop networks for African scholars by exploring topical and relevant African tax issues. The previous symposia considered VAT in developing countries (2016) and tax and corruption (2017), and again featured prominent international participants working alongside academics from the Department and other South African tax academics. The papers from these earlier symposia were published in accredited journals, including the e-Journal of Tax Research. The fourth symposium in the series titled ‘Tax: Changing pathways for Africa’ took place in 2019 and the next one focusing on taxpayer rights is planned for 2021.
 
Prof Evans was also heavily involved in 2018 in government consultations on the possible introduction of a capital gains tax in New Zealand, the only one of the 35 member-countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which currently does not have such a tax. He was commissioned by the New Zealand Government to advise on design issues that can ensure the new tax – if introduced – will be as simple as possible and will impose the minimum possible additional compliance burden on taxpayers.
 
- Author Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences

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