Large Business: Cooperative Compliance and the Role of Advisors (WP7)

Research group This component of the FairTax project will examine the emergence of ‘tax risk management’ as an organizing concept in private and public sector tax management thinking. The project will study both its impact on emerging co-operative compliance initiatives developed by government tax departments to deal exclusively with large business taxpayers, and the changing roles of professional tax advisors who work with large business taxpayers.

Large businesses present particular challenges to tax administrations, particularly in and increasingly globalized context. Because cooperative compliance initiatives for large businesses are anchored in a notion of mutual trust, national culture will be a factor is their success, as will the institutional setting including the role of professional advisors. The relationship between tax professionals, their clients and the tax authorities concern the integrity of the tax system as a whole. Tax professionals compete with other professionals and regulators for control for the definition and description of valid field knowledge, seeking to influence the construction and control of the boundaries of legitimate or compliant practice.

This comparative interpretive study will examine the emergence of cooperative compliance initiatives across a number of jurisdictions, with a primary focus on the United Kingdom and Ireland, to provide a better understanding of tax authority interactions with large business and their advisors. The researchers will analyze co-operative compliance initiatives such as realtime working, risk assessment, and client relationship management used by large business tax compliance units.