Do tax professionals know what a tax is? Tax conceptions amongst the tax profession

There is no conception of a tax amongst the tax profession. By drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews, this paper explores how the tax profession understands what a tax is, or what makes a tax, a tax. The data highlights that not only is there an inconsistent conception of a tax, but that the profession is unaware of its own lack of consistency – highlighting an important knowledge gap in the profession. As identifiable conceptions can be useful to advance all of our understanding of a concept, this lack of awareness around the range of conceptions is unhelpful. That there are multiple conceptions is unsurprising: there is often no definition of a tax to hang our conception from and many tax professionals are not exposed to critical tax thinking during their education and work.

Scholarship in the definition and concept of taxation is incredibly thin and this paper provides a starting point for discussions around our understanding of the tax concept. In particular, this paper argues that further academic research is needed to advance our understanding of the tax concept. In addition, space and opportunity should be given to tax professionals during their professional training to engage in more conceptual tax subjects.