Prof Steyn is a chartered accountant SA, with a PhD degree in taxation. Before his career started at the University of Pretoria, Prof Steyn gained valuable experience in practice through his internship at KPMG, and was appointed a senior audit manager at Ernst & Young. During his career he was a tax manager at Telkom SA, and acted as financial director for the Ampath Group of pathologists. He was also a senior partner in a medium size auditing and accounting practice and a director in a major short-term insurance broker company.

 

Prof Steyn joined the University of Pretoria in 2004 and has presented lectures for undergraduate and postgraduate Taxation students. He has acted as study leader for master’s and honours degree students and has been the programme leader for the Master’s Degree in Taxation since 2004. Prof Steyn’s experience at the University of Pretoria includes acting as the head of the Department of Taxation for more than three years. He has also acted as an external examiner on master’s and doctoral level for other universities.

 

His research interests include the tax burden of individual taxpayers and the perceptions of these taxpayers related to their tax burden. He has presented papers at both local and international conferences, and has published in international journals. He received the CCH/ATTA Doctoral Series Award in 2015 with his thesis, entitled ‘A conceptual framework for evaluating the tax burden of individual taxpayers’. He became the first scholar from outside Australasia to receive this prestigious award. The Australasian Tax Teachers Association (ATTA) and CCH, a leading global provider of tax, accounting and audit software, introduced this award in 2010 to recognise and promote high level research in taxation law and policy. This doctoral study was also awarded the first prize in the Norton Rose South Africa Tax Thesis competition in 2012. In 2013, Prof Steyn received an academic excellence award from the South African Institute of Tax Practitioners in recognition for the contribution his research made to the taxation discipline.