Johan van der Walt
Johan first came to Canberra in 2008 on a brief ‘sabbatical’ with the Australian Tax Office’s Aggressive Tax Planning section. The family moved to Canberra permanently at the start of 2016.
He is a qualified lawyer (South Africa) with extensive experience in tax dispute resolution and tax litigation. In 2014 Johan started the KPMG South Africa Dispute Resolution and Tax Controversy practice.
Before that Johan was a partner at a SA corporate law firm, which he had joined from the South African Revenue Service (SARS). At SARS he participated in devising the Voluntary Disclosure Program (VDP) allowing non-compliant taxpayers to regularize tax defaults and Exchange Control contraventions (similar to the ATO’s recent ‘project DO-IT’).
Research Interest
Seeing that Johan has done work in the tax regularization space he has a keen interest in the shift from “tax secrecy” to “tax transparency” (e.g. on the back of the Automatic Exchange of Information and country-by-country reporting) and the impact this shift (if sustained) would have on the compliance attitudes of the various participants in the regulatory community.
The research will be comparative with reference to Australia (developed economy; good tax compliance) vs. South Africa (developing economy; deeply-divided society with a particular political legacy; small tax base; questionable tax compliance levels).