Senators demand ‘facts’ on fiscal law and business

In fiscal law, the academic world and the business world seem to be heavily intertwined. With one incident after another, there’s a question that keeps coming back: does this field serve business or science?

Senators of VVD and GroenLinks-PvdA asked questions together. They wanted Minister Eppo Bruins to tell them how many full professors of tax law are also tax consultants. But Bruins doesn’t know, his answers reveal.

And why doesn’t he know? Bruins doesn’t have a good definition of ‘fiscal law’ and of ‘commercial consultancy firms’, says his spokesperson, so that means he can’t provide any figures. At umbrella organisation Universities of the Netherlands they don’t know either, Bruins already wrote to the Senate a few weeks ago.

This is remarkable, as in the past year more data has actually been made public about the ties between professors and the KPMGs of this world. After all, the ministry itself told universities to disclose the ancillary activities and sponsors of full professors. The universities have since done this.

Jan van de Streek, professor of tax law in Leiden, is therefore critical of the minister’s evasive answer. Those university lists of sponsors and ancillary activities provide a better overview than ever before, he believes. According to Van de Streek, it’s ‘entirely clear who is and isn’t independent of a commercial consultancy firm’.

And lists aside, he is aware of several studies on the number of fiscal law professors with dual roles. Those took more time and effort: back then, scientists and journalists had to scrape the data together themselves. So is it too much to ask for the minister to find out how things currently stand?

Van de Streek is known as a critic of the large number of colleagues with ‘dual roles’ in his field. At one time, he himself was employed by Loyens & Loeff, a firm in Amsterdam’s Zuidas business district, alongside his professorship at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). This ‘marriage’ ended when he became outspokenly critical of tax-evading multinationals after the financial crisis, Van de Streek told Leiden University magazine Mare.

There are other examples that also show a dual role can lead to conflicts. But that’s not even the reason why the VVD and GroenLinks-PvdA senators asked questions on the subject. Senator Daan Roovers from the latter party explains that for her, it’s about the scientific discipline as a whole. “If you see that a considerable percentage of professors also have major interests in the commercial sector, this does raise a few questions.”

The tax interests of multinationals sometimes trickle into academia. The University of Amsterdam’s tax law department promised American streaming service Netflix ‘a voice in the scientific debate’ in exchange for half a million dollars of sponsor money for one of the department’s projects, an investigation by Follow the Money revealed last year.

This month, more than one year later, the UvA’s academic integrity committee ruled that the independence of the department wasn’t compromised, although what happened did create the ‘appearance of partiality’.

An UvA committee that investigated the many ancillary activities with consultancy firms in 2022 saw that the tax law department “has a one-sided focus on corporate issues”, causing certain topics to disappear from view. “Income tax, dividend tax, VAT, benefits and the like are barely covered in research.”

Does this only apply to the UvA or to the scientific discipline as a whole, wonders Roovers. “We’ll ask follow-up questions, because the answers given by the minister are unsatisfactory”, she says. “I’m worried about the system, even if all of the individual professors behave with integrity.”