What Working Inside a Tax Authority Taught Me About Business

Part of my career was spent inside a national tax administration, in correspondence with other European tax administrations, the OECD and the IMF. It is not the part of my background people expect to hear about, and it is the part that most changed how I make decisions.

This is not an article about tax. It is about what happens to your thinking when you spend time somewhere that treats a decision as a thing that must survive scrutiny by strangers, years later, without you present to explain it.

What institutions get right

The first thing you notice is that somebody has already thought about what happens when this goes wrong. Not as an afterthought — as part of designing the process at all.

In a small business, the failure case is usually improvised at the moment of failure, by whoever happens to be there. In an institution it is written down in advance, because the consequences of improvisation are unacceptable. That is a genuine competence and most founders never acquire it.

The second thing is that decisions are recorded with their reasoning. Not just what was decided — why, and on what basis. It sounds bureaucratic until you have watched a small company relitigate the same question three times in a year because nobody could remember why it was settled.

The third is that the decision does not depend on the person. It survives someone leaving. Almost nothing in a small business does, and that fragility is invisible until the day it matters.

What they get wrong

Everything moves at the same speed.

The irreversible and the trivial receive identical treatment, identical process, identical time. It is not stupidity — it is the cost of a system designed so that no individual decision can go badly wrong. But it means genuine urgency has nowhere to go, and people inside those systems know it and are frustrated by it.

The founder's temptation is the exact mirror image: everything is fast and nothing is recorded. Both are failures of the same distinction. Neither side has separated the decisions that can be undone from the decisions that cannot.

The habit I kept

Before a decision of any weight, I ask whether I would be comfortable explaining the reasoning to someone competent, in two years, with no additional context available.

It is a strangely effective filter. It does not slow you down much, because most decisions pass immediately. But the ones that fail it tend to fail for a good reason — usually that the real justification is something I would rather not say out loud, like convenience, or momentum, or not wanting a difficult conversation.

Institutions build that filter into the process. Founders have to supply it themselves, and most of us do not until something has gone expensively wrong.

Disagreement is usually definitional

Watching several administrations work on the same question taught me something I now use constantly: competent parties who disagree are very often answering slightly different questions without realising it.

They are not in conflict about the answer. They have each defined the problem in a way that makes their answer obviously correct, and neither has surfaced the definition. Once the definitions are stated out loud, a surprising amount of disagreement simply dissolves.

In commercial life the same pattern shows up in negotiations, in partnerships, and in arguments inside a team. Before assuming someone is being difficult, it is worth checking what problem they think is being solved. It is the cheapest intervention available and it works far more often than it should.

Why I do not think this makes me cautious

People assume a regulated background produces a careful, slow operator. In my case it produced the opposite, and I think for a defensible reason.

Once you can tell reliably which decisions are irreversible, you can afford to be quick about everything else — and everything else is most of it. What looks like caution from outside is just refusing to spend the same care on a price change as on a legal commitment.

The people who genuinely move slowly are usually the ones who have not sorted their decisions at all. Every choice feels equally weighty, so everything takes a week. Sorting is what buys the speed.

Writing for someone who is not in the room

The most transferable skill I took from institutional work is unglamorous: writing something that has to be understood correctly by a stranger, later, without you there to clarify.

Almost all commercial writing assumes a reader who shares your context. Institutional writing cannot. It has to survive being read by someone in a different organisation, in a different country, in two years, with none of the surrounding conversation available. That constraint eliminates a great deal of imprecision very quickly.

It changed how I write contracts, briefs and internal decisions. Every ambiguity that feels harmless when everyone knows what was meant becomes expensive the moment the people change. And in business the people always change.

Process is not the opposite of speed

Founders often treat process as the enemy — the thing that large organisations acquire on their way to becoming slow. I understand why, and I think it confuses two different things.

Bad process is a requirement that exists because it once solved a problem nobody remembers. It should be removed, and institutions are genuinely poor at removing it.

Good process is a decision that has already been made, so nobody has to make it again. That is not the opposite of speed — it is the mechanism of speed. A business where every recurring question is settled in advance moves faster than one where each is debated freshly, and it produces far better decisions when the person handling it is tired.

The trick is that good process must be small, written, and owned by someone with the authority to delete it. Institutions get the first two right and the third badly wrong. That is the specific thing I try not to import.

What I took about records, and why founders resist it

Institutions keep records because they must. Founders avoid keeping them because it feels like administration rather than work. Both attitudes come from the same misunderstanding about what a record is for.

A record is not a description of what happened. It is a message to a future person — very often yourself — who will have forgotten the constraint you were operating under. Without it, every past decision looks either obvious or inexplicable, and both readings are wrong.

The version that works in a small business is not a filing system. It is one line, written at the moment: we chose this, because of that, having rejected the other. Thirty seconds. The compounding effect over three years is that you stop arguing about settled questions, and new people can be brought in without a week of oral history.

I have written more about this as an operating method in how one person ends up running several businesses, because it is the single habit that makes more than one business possible at all.

Where I part company with the institutional view

I want to be fair to a world I learned a great deal in, and also honest about where I think it is wrong.

Institutions treat consistency as the highest value. Two similar cases should receive similar treatment, and that is correct — it is the basis of fairness. But applied to commercial decisions it becomes a trap, because consistency across situations that only look alike produces decisions that are defensible and wrong.

Business rewards the opposite skill: noticing when this case is not like the last one, and being willing to act differently while being able to explain why. That is uncomfortable in an institution, where deviation invites scrutiny, and essential in a company, where the failure to deviate is how you miss everything.

So I kept the record-keeping and the failure-case thinking, and I deliberately left behind the instinct that similar treatment is automatically right. Knowing which parts of a training to discard is harder than acquiring it, and takes considerably longer.