Tune in to Focus Carolina during morning, noon and evening drive times and on the weekends to hear stories from faculty members at UNC and find out what ignites their passion for their work. Focus Carolina is an exclusive program on 97.9 The Hill WCHL, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Dr. Edward Maydew is a professor with UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and the director of the UNC Tax Center, which builds bridges to help tax scholars, policy makers and practitioners better understand tax research and how it affects real world issues. He comes from a tax-oriented family and Dr. Maydew’s father was also an accounting professor.

“My father was an accounting professor specializing in tax and it turns out that I am an accounting professor specializing in tax. I have one sibling, he’s a tax attorney, a younger brother. So one of the jokes we sometimes tell is maybe there’s a genetic component to that, some sort of gene that people haven’t identified that predisposes people to be interested in tax and accounting.”


Part of Dr. Maydew’s research is properly applying the tax code to personal and corporate returns and the difference between legal and illegal tax avoidance both within the county and abroad. Sorting out what goes on with offshore banking is also a challenge.

“It turns out big banks keep track of investment flows between countries. Most of it is purely legal movement of capital, but some fraction of that is money that is being hidden. The question is always, ‘How big is that fraction?'”