PD Dr. Caroline Heber and Dr. Deborah Fries were awarded the Albert Hensel Prize 2021 and 2020 at the annual conference of the Deutsche Steuerjuristische Gesellschaft e.V.. With this prize, the German Tax Law Society honours outstanding contributions by younger authors to research of tax law.

Caroline Heber is a senior research fellow at the Institute and an Albert Hensel Prize winner of 2021. The subject of her award-winning thesis “Enhanced Cooperation and European Tax Law” is a mechanism embedded within the European Treaties that allows a group of at least nine member states to enact EU law that is only binding between those member states. Caroline Heber analyses to what extent the deeper integration between the participating member states gives enhanced cooperation laws a privileged position – above the level of national law but not quite at the rank of universal secondary EU law, like directives and regulations. Such a privileged status of enhanced cooperation law has an impact on the possibility of participating member states to protect their harmonisation endeavours. “Enhanced Cooperation and European Tax Law” was published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Studies in European Law series.

Besides PD Dr. Caroline Heber, Isabella Zimmerl was awarded with the Albert Hensel Prize 2021 for her dissertation “Joint Tax Audits as a Starting Point for Enhancing the Effectiveness of the Mutual Agreement Procedure”, which she authored at the Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

The Albert Hensel Prize Winner for 2020 is Deborah Fries, a former PhD student of the Institute. As the annual conference of the DStJG was cancelled in 2020, she received the honour for her dissertation on “fiscal privilege” only at this year’s conference on 20 September 2021. In her comparative law work, Fries takes a close look at various forms of privileged treatment of the authorities in corporate insolvencies by examining fiscal privileges and their effects in Germany, France, the USA and Australia. The starting point is the question of the extent to which one can justify fiscal privileges in a modern insolvency system. On the one hand, the German authorities have to ensure the collection of taxes within the framework of Union law and national constitutional law; on the other hand, the equal treatment of creditors is a fundamental principle of German insolvency law. “Fiskusprivilegien” was published by the Otto Schmidt Verlag in 2020.

September 2021