Emer Mulligan is a Personal Professor of Taxation and Finance at J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics at the University of Galway, Head of the Accountancy and Finance Discipline, and Director of the University of Galway Tax Clinic.

This Tax Clinic, the first of its kind in Ireland, provides tax assistance and information to the student population and marginalised citizens via community organisations who may not otherwise have access to tax expertise and educates them and arms them with lifelong skills to handle their own tax affairs. She was Head of School from 2009-2015. She is a former member of the University of Galway’s Governing Authority. In 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.

Prof. Mulligan joined the University of Galway in 1999. Prior to this, having graduated from the University of Galway with a BComm and HDip in Education, she qualified as a tax professional with the Irish Taxation Institute, and worked as a Tax Consultant and Manager with Pricewaterhouse Coopers in Dublin. She subsequently graduated from the Smurfit Graduate School of Business in UCD with a first class honours MBS in Financial Services. She completed her PhD on Tax Planning in Practice at the University of Warwick, UK.

Prof. Mulligan’s research investigates the international social, political and economic dimensions of taxation from the perspectives and interactions of a range of stakeholders, including political policy makers, governmental regulators, international businesses, taxpayers and professional tax advisers. The three strands of her research programme are as follows: (i) Social Policy, Citizenship and Taxation (ii) Governance, tax planning and processes in multinationals, (iii) Regulatory Relationships and Compliance in the tax arena. Prof. Mulligan has published in highly ranked international peer reviewed journals including Accounting, Organizations and Society , Critical Perspectives on Accounting, British Tax Review, British Accounting Review and Financial Accountability; Management. Prof. Mulligan is a member of the Editorial Boards of Advances in Taxation and Journal of Tax Administration and is an International Fellow at the University of Exeter’s Tax Administration Research Centre (TARC), one of Europe’s leading research centres on tax. She is a member of the Steering Group of the UK-based Tax Research Network. Prof. Mulligan was Co-PI of an IRC funded project entitled Strengthening Public Administration Institutions through Digital Technologies: Investigating Effective Adoption of Digital Technologies in Tax Administrations. She was a consortium member of a successfully completed H2020 funded project entitled Revisioning the Fiscal EU; Fair, Sustainable, and Coordinated Tax and Social Policies. She is a former member of the EPAS Accreditation Board of the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), the Council of the Foundation for Fiscal Studies, and the Galway Chamber of Commerce.

Prof Mulligan teaches Taxation and Finance to undergraduates and postgraduate students. She has oversight of all Taxation modules at University of 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. Prof Mulligan is currently supervising four PhD students in taxation, and has previously supervised Master of Accounting, Master of Commerce, and Higher Diploma students at University of Galway. She has also jointly supervised students on the MSc in Management and Applications of Information Technology in Accounting at Dublin City University.