(June 14, 2015)
It was around Christmas 2013 that we came up with the idea of building a database containing useful information that would be available free of charge to tax professionals from all over the world.
From experience Alain knew that there is a lot of high level information available regarding the tax systems of different countries as well as their (withholding) tax rates. However, it is more difficult to find the actual texts of DTAs. Therefore we kicked-started our project by collecting links to governmental websites where they provide access to the DTAs that that State has concluded with other States. And although we were able to find a considerable number of websites, we have to admit that due to the fact that we do not speak all languages (we for example do not speak Spanish, French or Portuguese) the list is not yet complete.
After that we continued with collecting the texts of and the links to important EU Directives and Regulations, OECD Model Conventions and other important OECD Documents (including the creation of our amazing BEPS LIBRARY), and a selection of Rulings of the European Court of Justice.
In the first half of June 2014 International Tax Plaza then finally went live!
Since then International Tax Plaza has kept developing. With our last ventures being the quite successful introduction of a newsletter service and the adding of a Job Board to our website. On our Job Board tax professionals can find great career opportunities and companies looking for a tax professional can place job ads against reasonable prices. Currently pulling this project forward takes a lot of our, and especially Gosia’s, attention, because till now it remains difficult to reach the companies that are looking for tax professionals and to convince them to put a job ad on our job board. And we all know. No Job Board is as attractive as a filled Job Board.
During the last year many people have helped in different ways. By showing their appreciation and giving our articles likes on a regular basis or by just being available when we wanted to run our ideas by them or by giving us useful critics or by coming with the suggestion to start a newsletter service or simply by being the first one to have a job ad on our job board.
We are aware of the fact that we will most likely forget somebody but the people we definitely would like to thank include: Satwaki Chanda, Ricardo Seoane Rayo, Guillermo Teijeiro, Samad Laghmouchi, Sacha Martinez Sumner, Andy Shaw, Willem Bongaerts, Keith Brockman, Mario Volpe, Paolo Tartaglia, Antonino Giusto, Rendall Hofman and obviously everybody who has visited International Tax Plaza during the last year or who has subscribed to our newsletter! Some of you probably do not even realize how important your support or suggestions have been, but believe us it was/they were VERY important.
Once again thanks to everybody and we are looking forward to an other year in which the product familiarity of International Tax Plaza hopefully will keep growing.
Małgorzata Gergelewicz Alain J. Thielemans
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