ITR names ten most admired tax directors in the Asia-Pacific region
The International Tax Review has recently published (in its September, 2007 edition) its list of the ten most admired tax directors in the Asia – Pacific region.
The results were based on an on – line poll undertaken by International Tax Review of its readers.
The ten most admired tax directors are:
Jane Adam – Nissan
Sam Chay – CIMB Group
Vincci Lo – Lexmark Technology
Archie Parnell – Goldman Sachs
William Ramirez – Altria
Junie Schmidt – Microsoft
David Sutherland – Morgan Stanley
Sharon Tan – Dell
William Thomson – TimeWarner
Patrick Vannimmen – Procter & Gamble
In the accompanying article – “Developing Asia”, the tax directors discuss the challenges that they face in their roles.
These range from the challenges of travel, the shortage of talent to keeping up with change.
The latter is critical to in-house tax directors and an important opportunity for their advisers.
To quote from the ITR article:
Keeping up with change
For now, the directors must keep an eye on all the developments and try to keep up.
As Jane Adam points out: “tax rules in India and China seem to change almost daily!”
“You can see the tax authorities in the developing parts of Asia learning very fast,” said Thomson.
“One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that you keep yourself updated in real-time on the technical developments in a very fast changing tax landscape,” said Tan. “Also, new case law comes out all the time, so you have to watch that the arrangements and structures you have in place are still relevant.”
The pace at which the Asian tax authorities are advancing their systems is staggering. But the tax codes remain basic in comparison to Western laws.
In China for example, there was recently a complete overhaul of the corporate tax system and yet as Vannimmen explains: “When you look at the total law it’s about 60 articles and 10 pages long, which is less than a guideline of a little article made by the UK Revenue!”
“The law is just a framework, it’s very general. Chinese as a language is relatively vague so it is difficult to interpret,” he added.
“You have to manage the process on more of a relationship basis and on a reasonableness basis in Asia,” said Sutherland. “In the UK or the US very often you can look at the rules and see what is legal, without regard to whether it is the right thing for the tax administration.”
“In most Asian countries you can’t do that. You have to take into account whether you are being a good corporate citizen and convince the tax authorities that you are contributing your fair share.”
“Most Asian countries have got a system of relatively simple statutory rules but they have broad anti-abuse authority, so they basically just say to the taxpayers, ‘Don’t mess with us!’ “
Parnell agrees. “The US and Australia have very complicated systems and strain, if you will, to have rules about every particular situation, “he said.” If you fall within the rules you can have some level of clarity and comfort, which is good but the complexity is a bad thing.”
Source:”Developing Asia” International Tax Review September, 2007
