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What is your background?

I completed my undergraduate studies in Accounting, and Management Control & Information Systems in Chile, followed by a master’s and PhD in taxation. Before joining Kemmy Business School, I held full-time academic positions in Chile and the UK. My teaching experience also includes delivering taxation modules to students based in Singapore and United Arab Emirates. 

Prior to my academic career, I occupied tax and accounting positions in the corporate sector and performed tax and IT audits within PwC and Deloitte, respectively. These experiences continue to inform my research, giving me a practical lens through which I approach issues of tax policy and compliance. 

What are your research interests?

My research interests span a variety of themes in tax policy and practice. As part of the critical accounting/taxation community, I am interested in unveiling the societal implications of taxation, not from the financial perspective, but from citizens’, collectives, entrepreneurial and State positions. Much of my research is interdisciplinary in nature, looking at the intersection point of taxation with other disciplines such as political sciences, sociology, public administration and social psychology, to better understand how taxation functions in practice and how it shapes and is shaped by the people and institutions that engage with it. 

Can you tell us more about interdisciplinary and critical tax research and your own work? 

 This strand of research highlights the operation of different forms of power, domination and exclusion in the creation and administration of tax systems. 

While a significant body of work has paid attention to the content of tax legislation, and its effects on taxpayers’ and practitioners’ behaviour- including tax planning, avoidance and evasion- I am interested in going back in the chain: why is tax regulation the way it is? In other words, I examine not only when regulation is clear, robust, but more importantly, when it is uncertain, unclear or problematic, as this create enormous challenges for taxpayers and their advisers, and for the State. This interest led to the examination of tax policy making wherein the operation of power is central. I am interested in lifting the veil of politicians, bureaucrats, companies and practitioners, and other groups’ interests and subsequent behaviour, the power relationships established between them, and how those power relationships shape the content of tax policies and resulting regulation. Part of this work has been already published in well-established accounting and taxation journals. 

What is your current work?

I am currently involved in a few research projects- some solo-authored and others in collaboration with colleagues in the UK and Chile. I will briefly describe three of them.

The first, anchored in socio-legal scholarship, examines how multinational corporations and their advisers interpret and reconstruct problematic international tax rules in the Chilean context. Together with Professor Emerita Lynne Oats from the University of Exeter in the UK, we conducted interviews with powerful accounting and tax executives within multinational companies, their tax practitioners, and tax officials to refine our understanding of the interplay between private and public interests and the technical interpretation of tax statutes. One of our key findings is that interpretation is not neutral- they apply the letter of the law when it suits them, revealing the human and social dimensions of legal interpretation. 

In the second, co-authored with Professor Penelope Tuck from the University of Birmingham, we explore politicians and bureaucrats’ behaviour in the development of environmental tax policy. Supported by a grant from the Chartered Institute of Taxation from the UK, we organised research seminars with tax officials and other bureaucrats who were involved in the development of landfill tax policy and regulation in the mid-90s. Drawing on focus groups and retrospective interviews, we discern the different sensorial and cognitive mechanisms through which tax bureaucrats developed green awareness or green mentality, and how that, in turn, shaped the resulting legislation. 

The third research project, in co-authorship with Chilean policymaker and consultant  Amaya Fraile, explores taxpayers’ rights from political and public administration perspectives. To equate the unbalanced relationship between disempowered taxpayers and powerful tax administrations, taxpayers’ rights charts are now common worldwide. To supplement extant legal work in the area, informed by interviews with politicians, tax officials and other bureaucrats, think tanks and civil society representatives, we examine how corruption and misspending may complicate even more the already unequal relationship between taxpayers and the State. 

Any final observation?

Beyond the fight against misinformation and prejudice, one of our key responsibilities as academics is to engage with real-life challenges faced by governments, businesses and citizens, and to contribute to their resolution through rigorous and meaningful research. I believe that research can and should inform practice, helping to shape stronger institutions, fairer policies and informed public debate.