Dr Emer Mulligan

Dr Mulligan’s areas of interest include tax planning in practice, tax and strategy, performance measurement of the tax function, tax risk management, tax policy, tax compliance, tax lobbying, and tax administration, with particular interest in the institutional and social dimensions of taxation in practice. Her research activities fall into three broad categories (Tax in Practice; Tax Administration; and Behavioural Aspects of Taxation) with an overarching perspective of implications for one of the most important dimensions of public policy i.e. tax policy.

Dr Mulligan is a member of both the Performance Management and the Social Innovation and Policy research clusters at NUI Galway's Whitaker Institute of Innovation and Societal Change.  She is also a member of two multidisciplinary research groups at NUIG exploring opportunities for research in (i) Regulation and (ii) Gender and Taxation.

She is an International Fellow at the Tax Administration Research Centre (TARC) at the University of Exeter, one of Europe’s top tax research centres. TARC undertakes research on tax administration in order to strengthen the theoretical and empirical understanding of tax operations and policies. The Centre is operated in partnership by the University of Exeter and the UK’s Institute for Fiscal Studies, and its multidisciplinary research team includes economists, accountants, experimentalists, and psychologists. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Tax Administration, an open access journal for interdisciplinary tax research in the area of tax administration. The Journal is a joint venture between TARC and the Chartered Institute of Taxation (UK). Coverage includes tax compliance, tax authority organisation and functioning, comparative tax administration, global developments in tax administration, and the international editorial board comprises leading academics in the field. Dr Mulligan has also been appointed to the Editorial Board of the journal Advances in Taxation.

Dr Mulligan is a member of the Steering Group of the UK-based Tax Research Network, which has the objective of promoting tax research. She has been appointed to the EPAS Accreditation Board of the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), based in Brussels, Belguim, which is recognized globally as an accreditation body of quality in management education with established accreditation services for business schools and business school programmes, corporate universities and technology-enhanced learning programmes. Dr Mulligan has also been appointed to the Council of the Foundation for Fiscal Studies which is an independent, non-profit making body with the primary object of promoting study and discussion of issues relating to fiscal policy.

In May 2014, she was awarded a Fulbright-CRH Scholar Award to carry out research in Harvard University, specifically in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation within the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her research activities will focus on (i) taxation in practice in US MNCs and (ii) US tax policy and administration.

Dr Mulligan is currently leading a work package as part of a successful Horizon 2020 research funding bid. Total awarded to the international multi-partner consortium is Euro 2.8m and the research project is entitled 'Revisioning the “Fiscal EU”; Fair, Sustainable, and Coordinated Tax and Social Policies’. The project comes under the Societal Challenges pillar, and involves partners from universities and research institutes in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the UK, Austria, Czech Republic, Canada, Brazil and Ireland.

She has published in a number of international peer reviewed journals including Critical Perspectives on Accounting, British Tax Review, and Financial Accountability & Management.

Dr Mulligan teaches Taxation and Finance to undergraduates and postgraduate students. She has oversight of all Taxation modules at NUI Galway, delivers modules on corporation tax, income tax, capital gains tax and value added tax, and encapsulates the theory of taxation across all modules.

At both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, the tax courses are aligned with the professional qualifications of the Irish Taxation Institute (ITI), Chartered Accountants Ireland (CAI), Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and Certified Public Accountants (CPA).  

Her teaching philosophy is based around a number of key elements :

• Contextualising the theory and practice
• Demystifying the language
• Relating Content to student experience
• Ensuring technical accuracy
• Utilising technology, innovation and external perspective

Postgraduate Research Supervision

Dr Mulligan is currently supervising four PhD students in taxation, and has previously supervised Master of Accounting, Master of Commerce, and Higher Diploma students at NUI Galway.  She has also jointly supervised students on the MSc in Management and Applications of Information Technology in Accounting at Dublin City University.