After experiencing the taxi-driving industry first-hand, recent PhD graduate Maarten Rothengatter was driven to explore the financial issues facing cabbies.
Completed through UQ’s School of Social Science, Dr Rothengatter’s thesis investigated taxi drivers’ reasoning for avoiding paying tax.
“The research project has been a first attempt at lifting the veil off an industry that is poorly understood by both policy-makers and the general public with regard to its structure, inner-workings and the rather precarious ‘contractual’ arrangements of ‘bailee-drivers’,” Dr Rothengatter said.
Following his retrenchment from the insurance industry in 1992, Dr Rothengatter decided to enrol in sociology and philosophy at Deakin University, supporting himself by driving a taxi.
“My lived experiences as a researcher and cab driver came together, and in 2001 my PhD candidature was confirmed on the basis of a project that no one had carried out before in Australia,” he said.
“I wanted to undertake a qualitative piece of research that would allow cab drivers to tell their stories and express their feelings with regard to contributing to the common good by paying their rightful taxes.”
Dr Rothengatter’s research was based on focus-group interviews with taxi drivers, asking them to share why they felt they were entitled to avoid paying tax.
His discussions with different informants revealed that, according to popular rumours within the industry itself, approximately 75 percent of taxi drivers were not compliant with paying their income tax.
“In a complex way, the central theme that justifies the non-compliance of both drivers and cab-owners/operators is ‘basic survival’—the defence that if one was to pay the full amount of tax, it would no longer be worthwhile to operate a cab,” he said.
“As some of the informants put it: ‘without cheating, you would die’!"
Dr Rothengatter’s thesis offered several suggestions for solving the problem, but acknowledged that implementing harsher compliance enforcement measures could result in an acute shortage of taxi drivers.
“If the ATO wants to establish a more efficient auditing trail, it will need to get some form of legitimate access to the ‘electronic heart’ of every cab—the taxi-meter,” he said.
“Most cabs in Australia are equipped with sophisticated GPS tracking systems that provide instant information with regard to, for example, location; dispatch data; occupancy rates; total turnover and distances travelled during any given shift."
Dr Rothengatter completed his PhD under the supervision of Associate Professors Michael Emmison (Principal Advisor), from the School of Social Science, and Geoff Dow (Associate Advisor) from the School of Political Science and International Studies.
He is currently a Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University.
“It does not take too much of one’s imagination to envisage what the hospitality, tourism, entertainment and sporting industries would look like without an efficient and adequate supply of national taxi-transport facilities,” he said.
“Likewise, without professional and understanding people delivering a 24/7 taxi service, our elderly, frail, young or disabled fellow citizens would even be more severely disadvantaged.”
Media: Dr Rothengatter (07 5506 9356, 0411 016396, maarten.rothengatter@scu.edu.au) or Penny Robinson at UQ Communications (07 3365 9723, penny.robinson@uq.edu.au)
