As part of positioning TKB in the world of capacity development, a round table (RT) was set up with many participants. The RT was held on November 18 in Sociëteit De Witte in The Hague. This meeting was attended by Prof. Gerard Strijards, Paul M de Haan and Anna Gunn (for TKB) and a select group of (potential) supporters for business, academia and government.

Presentations were given by the undersecretary of Finance of Egypt, Mr. Ramy Mohamed Youssef and Mr. Geert Holterman of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, followed by a discussion among participants.

The main conclusions were that capacity building is important but that maintaining capacity in the long run just as important, countries need on the ground training and comprehensive programs involving people on the ground, i.e., Tax Inspectors Without Borders, but without the red tape. Furthermore, it became clear that there are very significant tax potentials (“untapped” tax base) in developing countries which could potentially be realized (IMF report 2023 and our TTP project). Lastly, it emerged from the meeting that TKB should be about taxation – governance – technology, ESG is especially important for recruitment/HR purposes, but avoiding an overly academic or theoretical focus.

Tax Tapping Project, TTP (ongoing)

As our name suggests, TKB works in the area of knowledge development. Our approach is “demand driven”, which basically means that TKB takes its lead from the needs and requests of our partners in different countries. In our experience, capacity building must be tailored to the (often very specific) situation at hand. A guiding notion is the fact that most developing countries have an unexploited tax potential of roughly 6 to 9% of Gross Domestic Product (IMF Building Tax Capacity in Developing Countries, SDN 2023/0065). There are many different ways to build knowledge and TKB is in principle open to any of these – subject of course to effectiveness and feasibility.

At the moment we are working to establish a ‘coalition of the willing’ consisting of public and private parties collaborating with Developing Countries in mining potentials. Private parties like PwC, EY and Prosus. Public parties like Dutch Foreign Affairs, Dutch Revenue, Ministry of Finance and IMF TADAT division. The latter could help us in the strengths and weaknesses analysis of the countries involved and further help us assess the impact of what the coalition with the country involved have achieved.

The form of our engagement is simply the Tax Inspectors Without Borders model without the draconic bureaucracy and including much, much more than audit support alone. We have planned a start up project session on September 2, 2025 in Rotterdam.