Zuidas firms exert influence on publications by tax law staff
Almost all professors of tax law at the UvA have a job at a large law or tax consultancy firm. According to them, it is ‘part of the DNA of the department,’ which they have long cherished. But that DNA has taken its toll on the department. For example, several large tax advisory firms have seen articles written by tax law staff for publication. Some have even been forced to adopt adaptations from higher-ups.
- Almost all staff members of the tax law department work only a few days a week at the UvA.
- Six of the seven 'regular' professors work at a tax consultancy, most of them at the Zuidas.
- Employees with an ancillary position are sometimes forced by their office to submit articles that they write as UvA employees.
- They experience insufficient support from the department.
- The department has announced that it is going to investigate.
- The consequences are also noticeable in education: due to the multitude of small contracts, students often have to wait a long time for feedback.
For the past two years, Building A on the Roeterseiland campus has looked abandoned. On many floors this was new, but not on the ninth floor. That's where the tax law department resides, where, according to sources, it hasn't been very busy for a decade.
That’s not surprising. All employees of the UvA tax law department have busy lives: except for a few, they all combine an appointment at the UvA with another job.
The regular professors in the department almost all hold positions in the same sector as well. With one exception, they all work at a tax consultancy or law firm in addition to their UvA appointment. This exception, who will soon be retired, works for the Council of State and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Supreme Court. The double hats are ‘in the DNA of the department,’ the professors believe.
DNA of the department
But that ‘DNA of the department’ which the professors have long insisted on is leading to problems, according to an investigation by Folia. Multiple sources report that they are required to submit any articles they write as UvA scholars to the office where they work the rest of the week, and that they have to make adjustments. They receive insufficient support from the department.
Lecturers who do not work at an officeAmong other academic staff in the department, there is greater diversity, which includes staff from the Tax Office or people who do not work at a tax consultancy. say they are unable to advance. In addition, sources say there is an almost constant shortage of experienced staff, and tax advisors from large firms are being used for teaching purposes for free.
What is going on at the Tax Law Section? Folia had access to confidential documents and correspondence, and spoke with 16 people involved and experts. Among them are several employees and former employees of the department. The result is a picture of a department that is closely intertwined with the large tax consultancy firms on the Zuidas, and where the interests of the firm sometimes take precedence over scientific integrity.
Double hats
Within Dutch law faculties, it is common for professors or lecturers to work in the field in addition to their appointment at a university. Many work as a (deputy) judge at a court or tribunal, work for a government agency, or have a position as a lawyer or consultant at a firm.
That this has advantages is beyond dispute for many jurists. Even fervent opponents of double hats within the legal profession acknowledge that lecturers with ancillary positions bring ‘valuable insights’ and that students can learn much from their practical knowledge. The law school itself also sees the benefits of a double hat: ‘We guard against the perception that ‘double hats’ by definition create integrity problems, and see the great value of these employees for our education in particular,’ writes the law school in its strategic plan.
Six zeros
It is also, according to some, hardly preventable. Law school is relatively closely intertwined with professional practice, and a career in academia is the reason for starting law school for only a very small proportion of students. When the law school of the UvA put out a vacancy last year for a full-time university lecturer in criminal law, a total of two letters of application were receivedThis is what Professor Benjamin van Rooij, research director of the Faculty of Law, told a congress on double hats last summer. An account of this meeting can be read in the January 2022 issue of Ars Aequi.. In other fields of study, this would be virtually unthinkable.
Moreover, while a university lecturer or a professorship is a particularly well-paid job in many sectors, it is not necessarily so for lawyers. A good lawyer already earns more than a professor.
One field in which particularly large number of professors wearing double hats is tax law. There the above problems play out in magnified form. Tax consultancy firms and law firms that specialize in tax law pay annual salaries with five or six zeros. Plus, there are so many firms in the Netherlands that virtually all graduates can get a job there. Anyone who chooses academia is a maverick.
Tax lawyers Reinier Kooiman and Daan Notenboom investigated what professors of tax law with and without a secondary position in the business world published about in recent years. They came to the conclusion that there is no substantial difference when it comes to how the currently applicable law is written about. This is the case when it comes to how the law should be: then professors with a double hat often write in favor of taxpayers. These are often corporations.
The authors also see a certain one-sidedness: ‘If the prevailing law has a positive outcome for the taxpayer but this outcome is not desirable, for example because there is a tax leak, professors with a double hat climb into the pen remarkably little.’
A counter analysis of the data by Leiden professor Vleggeert shows that this difference in the interpretation of the law does arise when a comparison is made between professors with an additional function in business and professors without any additional function (i.e. also not with a government body or as a judge).
This prompted Leiden professor of tax law Jan Vleggeert (no double hat) to advocate against double hats in his inaugural lecture in 2020. ‘Some subjects are not or not sufficiently discussed in the tax literature, presumably because from a commercial perspective it is more convenient to leave these subjects alone,’ he said in the Leiden auditorium in October 2020. ‘In addition, I cannot help feeling that professors with a commercial interest suspiciously often take a position that is in line with the client interest.’
Leiden professor Vleggeert was addressing all his colleagues in tax law. An inventory by de Volkskrant shows that all Dutch universities employ professors who also have an appointment as a lawyer or tax consultant. Some universities have more of these than others, and the UvA has the most. All 12 professors who worked at the department in 2021 had an ancillary position at the time. Only in Rotterdam did all professors of tax law also have an adjunct position. Proportionally, the UvA also had the most professors with ancillary positions in business.
Dean André Nollkaemper sees benefits in having a good connection between the tax law section and practice, but he acknowledges that the balance in the tax law section ‘has grown lopsided over the past 20 years, with too many small appointments, too many professors attached to a Zuidas office, and a lack of professors working full time, or almost full time, on the faculty.’
This situation has had ‘adverse effects in several ways,’ he indicates, ‘for example, through the limited availability of faculty to students.’ It also, he says, “poses risks to independence and integrity.’ ‘In recent years, therefore, many actions have been taken to address these problems. We are on the right track. but the legacy of 20 years cannot be undone overnight.’
Up to three days a week
On the ninth floor of the A building of the Roeterseiland campus sits the tax law department and its internationally renowned research institute: the Amsterdam Center for Tax Law (ACTL). At the head of the department is Professor Hein Vermeulen; his fellow professor Dennis Weber heads the ACTL. In addition to Vermeulen and Weber, there are five full professors and two professors by special appointment. There is no associate professor. But there is a program director, and a few university lecturers who work part time. As elsewhere in the country, the department is dominated by men. What does differ is that at the UvA there are particularly few professors of tax law with large contracts. There is not a single professor who works more than three days a week at the university, and the vast majority of professors and lecturers have contracts of 0.4 FTE or less.
In fact, until last September, only two employees worked more than half a week at the UvA. In September, three foreign jurists were hired for a project of the research institute ACTL; all three have an appointment of more than three days. However, they do not participate in undergraduate teaching. The appointments for the department chair and the research director will soon be increased to 0.6 FTE.
Combining part-time jobs
Combining jobs is part of what is called ‘the DNA of the department’ in tax law, as several people directly involved reported to Folia. Since the departure of Jaap Zwemmer about 15 years ago, even the department chairs are part-timers with minor appointments. According to sources, they can be found more often at their tax consultancy offices than at the UvA. The law school wants to put an end to this. The Faculty Strategic Plan adopted by the faculty in 2021 states "that leadership positions within departments and sections are held by employees with a (nearly) full-time appointment within the UvA.”
Since 2002, no ordinary professor of tax law has been appointed who does not also work at or for a tax consultancy or law firm. According to the sources Folia spoke to, this is also the DNA of the department: without a job at a firm you will never become a professor. The professors are also said to hint at this to PhD students and lecturers who want to advance their careers.
One source reports that ‘other interests’ come into play if you want to move up in the department and that you ‘can only get somewhere with the support of an firm’. Another source says that you can only become a professor ‘if you arrange for money.’ Still others report that they have been encouraged by departmental staff to keep working at their tax or consulting firm as well, as this would increase their chances of getting a good position within the department.
Unbelievably recalcitrant
Law dean André Nollkaemper says that the perception that an employee can only become a professor if she or he works in practice is ‘blatantly false’. ‘If this was ever the case, it is no longer so. In any case, there is no question of it being necessary to work in the Zuidas to be promoted to a higher rank. Every member of the faculty is judged on her or his merits. Practical experience can be useful, but a secondary position should and will never be a prerequisite.’
Nollkaemper, dean since 2016, says he has made a strong commitment in recent years to establishing a more robust faculty team, with expanded contracts. Five years later, that resulted in the hiring of three project researchers and a lecturer for the English-language post-master's program. All four of them have received large appointments. There are still too few employees with fuller appointments, according to Nollkaemper, but ‘we are dealing with the legacy of 20 years, which we cannot change overnight, especially with the tight labor market.’
According to Nollkaemper, ‘there have been several conversations about it, and something is moving.’ ‘Step by step we are moving in the right direction,’ he says. Since then, for example, the appointment of the section chairman has been extended from 0.4 to 0.6 FTE. ‘But the implementation, especially in this section, has proven to be unbelievably recalcitrant. The moment a vacancy arises, I want a full-time professor. Such a full-time or nearly full-time appointment is also necessary, in my view, to properly combine teaching, research, and administrative tasks.’
Permanent core
That legacy of 20 years that Nollkaemper is talking about was created after the departure of the last full-time UvA professor of tax law, Jaap Zwemmer. Zwemmer also sees that ‘there are now too many’ professors of tax law with double hats at the UvA. ‘I think it's important that every department or every discipline have a core of professors without double hats, and thus full academic freedom. The faculty should ensure that.’
Why that didn't happen after he left Zwemmer doesn't know, though he has an inkling. ‘I think they just couldn't find anyone who wanted to work full-time. In my opinion, it's mostly a financial issue. In practice, people can earn many times what they get at the university.’ Professors, in his view, ‘buy’ academic freedom by settling for a lower salary than they can get in the market.
However, this has not happened at the UvA for a long time, allowing ‘the DNA of the department’ to develop in recent decades to the point where there are no full-time professors, and for a time only one professor was working more than three days a week. Almost all sources tell Folia that for years it was unthinkable to have a contract for more than three days a week with the department. Plus, several people have had problems arranging even small extensions to their appointment at the UvA, insiders tell us. In the tax law section, people like to compare themselves to medical science, where the surgeon performs life-saving surgery in the morning and lectures in the afternoon.
Lex Bouter, professor of Methodology and Integrity at the Vrije Universiteit, says that in principle there is little wrong with ancillary positions of academics. However, he does call it ‘unfortunate’ when everyone in a department has ancillary positions that take up a lot of time. ‘Especially when these are mainly positions in a narrowly defined sector. That's not very clever. You then have no diversity within your research group, which makes you appear to be dependent on external parties, and in a certain sense you are.’
For research, the department also pays little. According to Dean Nollkaemper, this has to do with the fact that ‘the initial funding for research of this type of group is extremely limited.’ In 2018, the last year for which research institute ACTL published a publicly available annual report (available as a pdf here), 38 people did research at ACTL. Together, they were paid for only 2.84 FTE and 25 employees of the research institute had zero or no appointments.
This has changed somewhat as ACTL is working on a major project on taxation in a cashless, platform-based and technology-driven society. This project is largely paid for by Netflix, Microsoft, Nexi Pay, and several law and tax consulting firms. Three researchers with large contracts were hired for this purpose last year.
Silence is golden
Those double hats have their impact on the work of professors, observes Emeritus Professor Zwemmer. ‘I don't think people suddenly say very different things when they're wearing a double hat than when they weren't. But I do think people keep things quiet,’ he says.
‘When I was a professor myself, all my colleagues who all worked in the tax consultancy practice in addition to being professors knew a tax construction that I did not know about. It was a kind of trade secret that they used to help clients avoid paying taxes. They didn't talk to me about it, nor did they publish the construction,’ says Zwemmer. ‘I think you have to be especially mindful of the fact that professors with double hats don't deal with some cases or topics because they interfere with the interests of their practice.’
‘More neutral’
Marcel Pheijffer, professor of accountancy at Nyenrode University and professor of forensic accountancy at Leiden University, once tested this. He himself was offered ‘a top position’ at a Big Four firm (the term Big Four is used for the four largest consulting and accounting firms in the world: Ernst & Young, Deloitte, PwC and KPMG). Although Pheijffer already knew he would decline the offer, he accepted the invitation ‘out of curiosity’. It was immediately pointed out to him that if he wanted to work at the firm he would have to write ‘more neutrally’ about his field. ‘And I was also not allowed to write about accountancy-related issues that involved fellow firms.’
This is not unique. Virtually all double-hatted sources spoken to by Folia report that they have been ‘called to account" by their other employer after writing something the firm or its clients did not like. Several firms are involved in this. Some were ‘forbidden’ to talk to certain media and were no longer allowed to get involved in the social debate as academics on certain subjects. Others had to submit their speaking notes to their office which were subsequently returned to them with changes, even when they had been invited as UvA scholars. In the case of one of them, this even happened for a hearing he had been invited to in the House of Representatives.
Unacceptable
Law professor Nollkaemper says he finds these reports shocking. He says that as a result of these reports he has made inquiries with the current section chair and the director of the research institute. ‘They had not heard of this before, but the section chair will investigate this,’ he says. ‘It would be unacceptable, an outright and flagrant violation of academic integrity. Anyone who has this happen to them can count on my personal support. Any kind of interference from any outside party is totally unacceptable. Firms that engage in such practices have no place in the network of parties with whom we work.’
Integrity expert Bouter agrees that such a thing should be unthinkable. ‘Publication vetoes are unacceptable. Of course, you can submit a draft article to your other employer with a request for comments. But you should be free to decide what to adopt from that.’
Bouter understands, however, that it is difficult to respond when an employee is financially dependent on another employer. ‘It is important to make firm agreements about this beforehand. If the company in question does go over the top, then the head of the department or the dean should have a firm talk with the party where the ancillary function is performed. It must be clear that this is not acceptable. After all, it is contrary to what we have agreed in academia and laid down in codes of conduct.’
But this is not what is happening at the tax law department, several sources say from their own experience. Several of them have told Folia that they did not feel that they had enough support. Two of them have discussed this with a professor from the department, but both were told that they had to compromise, or that they had to ‘take both interests into account’. Another did not bother to discuss it internally. ‘It didn't even occur to me. Maybe because I didn't expect anything from them anyway.’
Minor appointments in education
Another part of the ‘DNA of the department’ is that for years teaching has been done by people who either do it for free or have very minor appointments. The vast majority of sources Folia spoke to have taught for free for an extended period of time or have been asked to do so. Some of the Section's teaching continues to be done by guest lecturers from the tax consulting practice or from the Tax Department, who work for free.
As a result, lecturers are more or less forced to continue working in a tax consultancy practice or at the Tax Administration. Sources tell us that many lecturers are made available by their offices for a day or half a day a week to give lectures at the UvA. ‘It confers status if you can say you are working at a university,’ says one who worked at the UvA for a long time in such a way. ‘You also get a UvA account that allows you to access all the databases of the University Library. You can then also use that for your work. If you had to pay for them yourself, it would cost you thousands of euros a year.’
Charitable
Others see something ‘charitable’ in it: as an advisor or partner in a large firm, they sometimes earn a lot of money every year and ‘give something back’ to society and the younger generation for free. In addition to academic status, this also gives them prestige among their peers in the world.
However, the recruitment of professors also happens on a more ad hoc basis, another source tells Folia. He says that a professor regularly promises offices or advisers that something can be arranged for them within the UvA. ‘Then he has promised that people can teach and they have to be placed somewhere.’
Yet this policy has consequences. ‘All these external lecturers are willing to give a lecture, but when there is a proctoring session or when papers need to be graded, they don't respond,’ says an insider. Because these volunteer lecturers are not bound by anything and can quit immediately when they or their office decide to do so, the department is constantly under threat of staff shortages and has little time for things like curriculum renewal.
Another source finds it ‘incredibly wrong’ that there is ‘just no commitment’ to education in the department. ‘If someone works for free, you can't hold them to anything.’ As a result, students systematically have to wait a long time for feedback or assessments of exams, assignments or theses.
A source with insight into the graduation level of various universities sees that UvA graduates ‘are not currently among the top.’ ‘This has to be turned around because in the long run, it's not good for the reputation of the university.’
Dean Nollkaemper acknowledges that the build-up of part-time lecturers in the department over many years has had undesirable effects on education. He states that steps have now been taken to address this: for all programs, he says, a core team of faculty with larger appointments has now been secured. For a bachelor's (with about 200 students) and a master's (with about 240 students), in addition to the department chair (soon to be 0.6 FTE), this involves the program director (0.9 FTE) and a lecturer (0.6 FTE).
According to Nollkaemper, however, it is too simplistic to attribute the problems to the hiring of external lecturers. ‘First of all, all departments in the law school have a structurally high workload due to underfunding,’ he says. ‘Second, it is almost impossible to recruit university lecturers in tax law in the Netherlands.’ According to him, the last open vacancy for four staff members yielded a total of zero applications from the Netherlands. ‘Third, the use of guest lecturers actually reduces the workload of the regular staff.’
Poor score in the Keuzegids
The master's in tax law at the UvA does not score well in recent surveys, either. The KeuzegidsDe Keuzegids Masters compares all master's programs of Dutch universities and university colleges. Masters are compared to other masters in the same field, in this case, tax law. Masters that score much better than comparable studies are given the score ++, masters that score much worse --., which uses data from the National Student Survey (NSE), gives the study only minuses. In the areas of content, testing, atmosphere and career preparation, the study even received a double negative. By comparison, there is only one other master's in tax law that gets a double minus. Only the Leiden master gets one double minus, for atmosphere.
According to Dean Nollkaemper, however, there is a lot to be said against the score in the Keuzegids. According to him, the response rate of the National Student Survey is too low to be considered reliable. ‘In addition, the NSE shows that two-thirds of master's students in tax law are satisfied or very satisfied with the lecturers. More than 90 percent of students indicate that lecturers have substantive expertise and a great deal of knowledge about professional practice.’ He does acknowledge, however, that there are students with complaints about timely responses to e-mails and the timely provision of feedback. ‘It is precisely for this reason that several years ago efforts were made to create a more robust teaching team.’
This article is based in part on interviews with 16 people who are involved, most of whom wished to speak only on condition of anonymity. The majority of them were interviewed several times. In addition, Folia has had access to confidential documents and correspondence, and has made use of documents that have been made available following an appeal to the Open Government Act (Wob). Public sources were also used, such as annual reports, faculty strategic plans and articles in legal journals.
Nollkaemper argues that during a recent educational visit, the advantages of the interaction with practice were mentioned. He quotes: ‘Because many lecturers also work in professional tax practice, in their courses they always make the connection with developments in the professional field.’
Working Group Integrity
Dean Nollkaemper indicates that he is very concerned about integrity and independence. That is why, ‘precisely in view of the connection of several departments of the faculty with professional practice,’ he set up an Integrity Working Group last year. ‘This working group was started some time ago, precisely to scrutinize fundamental questions about independence and funding, among other things, and to make recommendations,’ he said earlier.
‘The national rules on independence and integrity must, of course, be carefully and rigorously applied by all staff who also work in the field,’ he continued. ‘But how we can ensure this raises many questions. The working group made recommendations on this in February.’ In response, Nollkaemper announced a ‘faculty-wide discussion.’ That is scheduled to take place soon.
