Tax professionals under fire: 'I'm regarded as shady'
Tax lawyers are under fire in the public eye. They are held directly responsible for tax evasion by multinationals. Assistant professor Elody Hutten is researching how tax professionals deal with this criticism and was interviewed about it by the Financieele Dagblad.
Hutten: ‘Tax specialists reason from the point of view of laws and regulations. This is natural for them. But for an outsider like me, who has not worked in the tax industry, it is striking how much the world of tax specialists and non-tax specialists differs.'
‘In response to the 2008 financial crisis, civil society organisations and politicians started questioning the tax behaviour of multinationals’ (FD). It seemed they were doing everything they could to avoid paying as much tax as possible through ‘tax planning’.
This blame is directly passed on to tax professionals. Hutten interviewed several professionals for her research: ‘When I used to come to birthdays and I said what I did, nobody knew what it was, and now everybody knows what it is and I am mistaken for a, yes I won't say criminal, but shady.’
Another interviewee does not think it is his job to apply ethics and social interest in his work. ‘It's a bit like if a lawyer would eventually want to stop defending child rapists.’ He does not think it's his responsibility to make sure everyone contributes their fair share. ‘After all, my role is to help people, to get clients to pay as little tax as possible and of course map out all the risks of that.’