Life as a Tax Strategist (FINAL)

Life as a Tax Strategist

 

I had interned at KPMG Taiwan over the summer for two consecutive years. My journey started during my freshman year as a tax intern and later followed by a second year at the same tax department. Even though I am certainly not knowledgeable enough to prepare a client’s tax return without mistake, let alone answer all tax questions, the time I spent in the company has given me enough understanding about life as a tax strategist.

 

Working as a tax strategist is more than reading tax codes and preparing tax returns. Consultation, presentation, and negotiation constitute most of the daily tasks.

 

Consultation

Tax strategist is responsible for providing tax strategies that minimize the tax paid by the client. This is certainly not an easy task since there is a variety of rules that a tax strategist should keep track of. Through mix and match a range of tax codes, tax strategist comes up with an optimized strategy that satisfies the government’s need to collect tax while keeps the out of pocket cash from the client as low as possible.

 

To put this into perspective, one of my daily tasks is to read through various tax codes to make sure the strategies we came up with were legal and would not cause the client any unexpected repercussions in the future. We need to calculate the possible tax expense a client needs to pay with all the potential tax strategies available to make sure it is the one that gives us the best result.

 

Tax strategist takes deductions and carefully adjusts the weight of the various assets on the client’s tax return. During this process, tax strategist also makes sure the client pays a reasonable amount of tax (not too little and certainly not too much) so the taxation authorities would not impose fines on them in the future. The tax strategist’s job is to balance the two sides of this seesaw so that it does not tip and hurt the ones on the top.

 

Delivery

Good delivery means everything to a tax strategist. It is nearly impossible for a client to understand the strategy without a coherent presentation. Tax personals spend most of their time creating PowerPoints and drawing diagrams to explain the nuance of every tax strategy. These diagrams that contain arrows, lines, and shapes serve as the most effective method to explain the complex connections between entities and the movement of cash. As a tax intern, I often found myself spending a full week creating multiple versions of the same flow diagram just to make sure the complicated tax strategy is straightforward enough that even a middle school student can make sense of it. Through these experiences, I learn that oftentimes the strategy itself is less important and the layout of the PowerPoint is what matters to the client. This is especially true if the current year strategy does not provide a more optimal reporting method to reduce tax expense. In this case, the least we can do as tax strategies are to create a well-design diagram that highlights the reason why there is difficulty in achieving a lower tax rate.

 

Negotiation 

Finally, I would say the most important job of a tax strategist in Taiwan is to negotiate with the Taxation Bureau. You can think a tax strategist’s as a dealer in this context. When a client violates a regulation and gets fine by the tax authorities, a tax strategist could negotiate with the officers on behalf of the client for a better deal. This deal may include paying a lesser fine or even pay back a lesser portion of the tax. Like a dealership where the middleman bridges the discrepancy between the buyer and seller’s expectation in order to reach a mutually acceptable price, tax strategist communicates the client’s needs and resolution to pay tax in order to arrange a less pricy fine. This makes a huge difference for the client since the effect of most tax strategies aren’t readily available for the client to survey within a short period of time but the result of the negotiation is directly reflected on the tax bill that could be sent out for payment a week from the negotiation. This year, my colleague was able to negotiate a 40% cut for a client’s tax owe during the year 2018 by illustrating to the officer that the client had no intention to evade tax. This act of negotiating fines and taxes, however, is unique to Taiwan. Taiwanese government believes that keeping some grey areas in taxation is necessary for keeping the companies in the country. Therefore, even though I personally rate this as the most important part of a tax strategist’s job, negotiation is a job content that is unique to the location of the firm.   

 

Being a tax strategist is so much more than wearing a pair of thick glasses and sitting in a cubical miserably filling in tax returns while crunching numbers into the calculator. The soft skill required for this job, in my opinion, outweighs the technical skills required to be successful. What I have outlined in this blog is only the tip of the iceberg of a tax strategist’s job. The rest that’s left requires more exploration and personal experience.  

 

 

READABILITY REPORT

Flesh Reading Ease: 52.2

Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level: 11.8

Passive Voice: 0%