TY - JOUR
T1 - Tax clinics in Australia : the road to legitimacy
AU - Whait, Robert
AU - Vitale, Connie
AU - Castelyn, Donovan
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Tax Clinics are a recent phenomenon in Australia although their heritage dates to the early 1960s in the United States of America. Notwithstanding the international reverence with which tax clinics have been associated, there has and remains a need for these initiatives to be legitimised domestically. To that end this article evaluates the process undertaken by participants in the National Tax Clinic Program ('NTCP') to achieve legitimacy in Australia during the first year of their operation in 2019 while the NTCP was being trialed. More specifically, the article responds to the research question: what legitimation strategies were employed by Australian tax clinics during the trial phase? The article engages inductive analysis to respond to the research question and analyses disclosures made by each NTCP participant in manuscripts published in a special issue of the Journal of Australian Taxation. The article clearly demonstrates how tax clinics have adopted pragmatic, moral and cognitive strategies to attain legitimacy and provides a series supporting practical examples. These examples show that clinics relied predominantly on pragmatic legitimacy strategies with moral and cognitive legitimacy strategies being employed to a lesser extent.
AB - Tax Clinics are a recent phenomenon in Australia although their heritage dates to the early 1960s in the United States of America. Notwithstanding the international reverence with which tax clinics have been associated, there has and remains a need for these initiatives to be legitimised domestically. To that end this article evaluates the process undertaken by participants in the National Tax Clinic Program ('NTCP') to achieve legitimacy in Australia during the first year of their operation in 2019 while the NTCP was being trialed. More specifically, the article responds to the research question: what legitimation strategies were employed by Australian tax clinics during the trial phase? The article engages inductive analysis to respond to the research question and analyses disclosures made by each NTCP participant in manuscripts published in a special issue of the Journal of Australian Taxation. The article clearly demonstrates how tax clinics have adopted pragmatic, moral and cognitive strategies to attain legitimacy and provides a series supporting practical examples. These examples show that clinics relied predominantly on pragmatic legitimacy strategies with moral and cognitive legitimacy strategies being employed to a lesser extent.
UR - https://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:70898
UR - https://search-informit-org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/doi/10.3316/informit.013423018523346
M3 - Article
SN - 1832-911X
VL - 17
SP - 57
EP - 84
JO - Journal of the Australasian Tax Teachers Association
JF - Journal of the Australasian Tax Teachers Association
IS - 1
ER -