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On page 18 of this edition we publish the shortlist for this year’s Taxation Awards. Congratulations to all who are on the shortlist and commiserations to those who didn’t quite make it. After two years of virtual events it will be great to present the awards live this year and I look forward to meeting as many readers as possible at the London Hilton, Park Lane on 12 May.
Taking the pulse of the profession
I always enjoy reading the entries (and yes I do read them all) – not only because it is always good to be able to pick winners, but because of the insights it gives into the state and health of our profession. With entries from firms large and small, lawyers and accountants, new businesses and old-established firms and people at the start and towards the end of their careers, collectively the submissions give a compelling snapshot of the tax world as it is today. I see it as taking the temperature of the profession.
I am pleased to report that my temperature check shows that collectively we are in good health. The past two years have been exceptionally challenging, but we have largely come through unscathed. Indeed, many firms have taken positive lessons from the pandemic. That is not something which we might have foreseen at the worst moments of the first lockdown.
Covid, Covid, Covid...
So it is hardly surprising that almost every entry mentioned Covid. As well as all of the problems associated with migration to home working all sorts of other issues arose. How do firms recruit in a pandemic? How do they incorporate new members into a team when none of them were able to meet in person for over a year? How does someone launch a new business (as happened to more than one entrant) in the very week that lockdown was announced?
People have been remarkably resilient, and businesses have adapted very successfully. Technology has clearly been vital here: the words Zoom or Teams would hardly have figured in entries a couple of years ago but now they are everywhere. It is clear that most firms are, as the impact of the pandemic lessens, looking at some form of hybrid model with staff spending at least some days each week working at home. It will be very interesting to track this over the coming years – will hybrid be the new norm or will there be a gradual drift back to the office? Based on what I have seen I cannot ever imagine that we will get back to ‘five days in the office’ culture.
Technology
Technology is not just about home working of course – it has had a massive impact on the way that we interact with our clients. This is not only in the ever-expanding range of software available but also how we communicate with clients. In a digital world physical presence may no longer be important.
Certainly it has caused me to wonder how long we can still have categories for single office and regional firms. If it is possible to service clients in all parts of the UK, indeed all around the world, from a single office in a small town has it become an international firm? There will be businesses that are still firmly rooted in their local communities, of course, and some of them go from strength to strength, but I do begin to wonder where the long-term future for such business lies.
Working nine to five
Perhaps as a consequence of this shift in working patterns we saw many entries devoting significant time explaining their firm’s approach to work-life balance, wellbeing and mental health. I’m not saying that good firms have not always looked after their employees, but I do not recall anything other than the briefest mention of these issues in past entries.
This year, by contrast, we saw many firms putting these issues right at the front of their submissions. There may be an element of wanting to say the right things and to use the right buzz words, but I didn’t get much sense of this. There does seem to have been a sea change in the approach to supporting people. That is something really to be welcomed. I could not help but smile, however, when I read of one firm tracking employees’ time to ensure that they didn’t work beyond their contracted hours. Things have certainly changed since my early days in practice when the idea of a swift exit at 5:30 every day (well unless it was 5:30am) was not something that would do you any favours in your career development.
The crypto revolution
If we look specifically at the work that people are doing one thing that really caught my eye was the number of people emphasising the work they do on cryptocurrencies.
I am still a little behind the curve here and tend to think of cryptocurrency as some geeky novelty of interest only to a few nerds. Of course I am completely wrong, and the latest figure I saw showed that nearly 19% of the UK population (ie ten million) have bought cryptocurrency at some point. So it has moved well into the mainstream and it is not perhaps a surprise that it featured highly in many entries. This was not just from the largest firms – quite a number of regional and smaller firms had invested in training and recruiting staff to deal with the many tax issues which crypto currencies bring and expertise is now really starting to build up across the whole of the tax profession. Indeed if, like me, readers have not really caught up with all of this they may need to get their skates on before they get completely left behind.
Client service
Cryptocurrency is just one example of the extraordinary diversity of work which our profession now undertakes. There is still plenty of room for the general practice firm servicing a diverse group of clients across all of the taxes but, increasingly, we see the very deep specialisms which have developed within tax. The biggest issue here is how to ensure that that highly specialist advice is properly integrated within the overall client service.
It is interesting for example to look at the various capital allowances and research and development specialist teams. Some of them take great pride in the fact that they handle everything relating to a claim – while others stress how they work with the clients’ other advisers to ensure that claims are considered in the round. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are definitively some quite different approaches here.
Risky business
Another area of great emphasis was tax risk – both in terms of what planning was sold to clients and also the way that risk is managed internally. This has been a continuing trend over the past few years. When I first started to get involved in the awards, entries would be full of how firms were at the cutting edge of selling innovative tax products to clients. How times have changed.
Now we are far more likely to read about how firms deliberate do not operate in that market. The public perception that the entire tax industry spends all of its time exploiting tax loopholes and bending the rules could not be further from the truth. Different firms do of course place the boundary line in different places, and there is nothing wrong in that, but caution is the watchword everywhere.
Brexit
One word which did not occur nearly as much as I was expecting was Brexit. We did not have any team awards last year and I suspect that if we had had them Brexit would have featured, but this year it was conspicuous by its near absence.
Those dealing directly with international trade matters and customs duties did of course bring it into their submissions but even there it was not dominant. Many others hardly mentioned it. Perhaps it has now become a fact of life and become part of business as usual which does not need separate comment.
Certainly from the evidence of this year’s entries Brexit has not been a major disruptor of the tax profession in the way that perhaps some of us expected immediately after the referendum.
From strength to strength
So, all in all our profession and all who work in it are in good shape.
Covid has inevitably forced people to think fundamentally about how they run the business and manage their staff, but most people are seeing this as a positive. It takes a major crisis to force through changes which probably needed making but which were unlikely to happen on their own. But, in essence, we are doing what we have always done as a profession – giving high quality tax advice to clients of all shapes and sizes, professionally and with real insights and expertise. Long may it continue.
See you on the night
It only remains for me to thank everybody who put the time and effort into making the entries so interesting and readable.
Readers will have to wait until May to find out who has won, but rest assured that the best entries display the very high standards which we have come to expect from the Taxation Awards. And that is why I am certain, beyond doubt, that we do not need to worry about the future of our profession.
