Saré Pienaar, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences’ Department of Taxation, won the award for the best PhD presentation at the Australasian Tax Teachers Association (ATTA) annual conference 2020, which was hosted by the University of Tasmania in Hobart from 22 to 24 January.   

Pienaar researched the influence of tax policy change using a historical institutionalist approach with case studies on VAT and sugar tax and was awarded a scholarship by ATTA to attend the conference. The conference specifically facilitated a day on which 12 PhD students presented their research. Pienaar explains that the winning presentation mainly focused on the development of the title, the theoretical framework applied and a background to the study in terms of the unique setting in South Africa.

‘The ATTA conference was a wonderful opportunity to meet established researchers as well as other PhD students. I learnt valuable lessons from listening to presentations by other students and learnt about current topical issues in taxation around the world,’ she said. She added that the other attendees of the conference were very inclusive, and therefore relationships could be established for future reference and especially the possibility of collaboration.

What makes this even more special is the fact that the same prize was won by Pienaar’s colleague, Mpumi Monageng in 2019. This confirms the high quality of research that is conducted in the Department of Taxation. 

An extraordinary professor from the Department of Taxation, Prof Lisa Marriott, won the award for best conference paper with her co-author Dr Rob Whait at the same conference. The title of their paper was ‘Water taxes: A systematic review with application to Australia and New Zealand’.