Division
The Division is engaged in teaching and research in the field of domestic and international business taxation at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. These web pages provide you with information on our study facilities and current research.
We would like to begin by outlining the objectives of our Devision:
"The hardest thing in the whole world to understand is income tax."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Physicist und Nobel Prize winner
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Physicist und Nobel Prize winner
Such criticism of the state of German tax law still has relevance today. We therefore find it important to set our teaching focus on the systematics of tax rules and the impacts of taxation. We wish to enable students to incorporate tax effects in business decisions and to form an opinion on the structure and design of our tax system.
"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest number of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing."
Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-83)
Finance Minister of Louis XIV.
Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-83)
Finance Minister of Louis XIV.
The political enforceability of fiscal reforms may still be assessed in terms of the strength of protests by the lobby concerned. However, in academic discussion, the only guiding question is whether the actual distribution of tax burden corresponds to the intentions of legislators. Beyond this our research work is focused on the impact of tax law on business decisions. On this basis we aim to facilitate decisions taking into account their tax consequences, and provide legislators with recommendations for possible tax reforms.