Accounting sweeps board in tax thesis competition

Taxing work: Dr Matthew Marcus and Ilse Gaum, winners at the inaugural Deneys Reitz National Tax Thesis Competition, with UCT's Assoc Prof Jennifer Roeleveld and Prof Peter Surtees.

The UCT Department of Accounting made a clean sweep of prizes at the inaugural 2008 Deneys Reitz National Tax Thesis Competition, scooping R20 000 in prize money, announced at a gala dinner in Johannesburg.

The winner in the doctoral category was Dr Matthew Marcus, whose thesis was supervised jointly by Associate Professor Jennifer Roeleveld. Marcus won the award for his thesis, A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the South African Tax System 1995-2005.

Ilse Gaum won the honours award for her research report, Withholding Tax on Immovable property Disposals by Non-Residents.

They each pocketed R10 000.

Both works earned praise from Advocate Peter Solomon SC, who did the final adjudication. Judging was undertaken by a team of tax experts at co-sponsors Deneys Reitz, Sasol and FirstRand.

Godfrey Howes, head of Direct Tax at the FirstRand Banking Group, said the competition augured well for the future of tax research, the establishment of a database of tax knowledge and the ongoing development of tax policy in South Africa.