Back in the ‘80’s most people in the UK knew nothing about international tax. Myself included. Some 30 years later I’ve learned a thing or two. But it took an emigration to the Netherlands to get there. Why did I do it? Because I wanted to know how tax worked. Outside of a single jurisdiction. I had been working for a few years with a leading city law firm with high end multinational clients, and I had no idea how my advice impacted on the rest of their business outside the UK. I was also keen to combine tax with my love of languages. When I saw the job advert for an international tax manager in Amsterdam I knew this was the key to finding the answers to my questions. In fact many of those answers were picked up along my varied career path, with Big 4 tax advisors, a leading tax publisher, a tax training academy, one of the biggest tax libraries in the world, a boutique tax firm and two tax technical research departments. During that time I’ve been doing little else than writing and speaking about tax, training up tax advisors, multinationals, and government officials from all over the world, as well as developing things like taxonomies, tax analytics tools and audio-visual explainer materials. And I still am, now as an independent consultant. OK, I also sing and collect stamps in my spare time.