TTPP105: How to Be The External Tax Advisor In-House Tax Teams Want with Stephen Hodgson
Description
In this episode, learn what in-house tax teams value and want from external tax advisors, so you can be their advisor of choice, with our guest Stephen Hodgson, in-house Head of Indirect Tax at Entain. There’s some excellent advice from Stephen too re how to break bad news to a client in a good way and re what practical tax advice actually is.
Show notes: thetaxprofessionalspodcast.com/TTPP105
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You’ll Learn
- The indirect tax team that Stephen runs
- (9:00 ) The type of external advice that Stephen’s team in particular take
- (13:00 ) What do in-house tax teams want from external advisors
- (15:15 ) What level of responsiveness/communication is needed to keep in-house tax team happy
- (20:00 ) Whether, even as a large corporate, they would only consider Big 4 advisors?
- (23:00 ) The impact of cost when it comes to choosing and working with external tax advisors
- (25:30 ) The factor of industry knowledge and direct knowledge of the business
- (28:30 ) What Stephen means by practical advice (which is valued very much)
- (34:15 ) What a bad external advisor looks like? Bad traits/attributes
- (36:15 ) How to deal with giving advice the client won’t want to hear in a way that they value
- (40:30 ) Who interacts with external advisors – is it only the heads of tax?
- (43:00 ) How to build a relationship with an in-house tax team from scratch to have the opportunity to support them
- (51:00 ) What Stephen would do differently when working with in-house tax teams, if he were to go back to practice
- (54:30 ) How an external tax advisor can be the advisor that an in-house tax team wants to work with and value?
Resources
Previous episode with Stephen: TTPP53: Moving from Practice to In-House (Industry) with Stephen Hodgson, In-House Head of Indirect Tax