Corporate and International Tax Director

The Role

As a Corporate Tax Director, you provide strategic leadership on tax matters, managing and delivering tax advisory projects as well as ensuring the Bicester clients maintain compliance with UK tax regulations. You will drive business development, offer expert tax planning advice, and deliver revenue and profitability targets. Your role focuses on delivering exceptional client service and advancing the firm’s growth and reputation.

Core Skills

• Client Focus
  • Lead on managing and building client relationships with Azets clients with responsibility for developing relationships on key clients.
  • Identifies and delivers service improvements.
  • Demonstrates a deep understanding of client underlying future needs.
  • Understands current & future forces that will shape and influence clients' needs.
  • Uses a variety of influence approaches for strategic impact.
  • Makes decisions based on maintaining long term relationships.
  • Delivers excellent client satisfaction as measured by relevant KPIs.
  • Manages client complaints in accordance with Azets processes.
  • Takes the lead on cross service line delivery on own client base.
• Technical Excellence
  • Recognised as a technical expert.
  • Provides oversight and takes responsibility for ensuring we deliver accurate, high quality work for our clients and assesses future technical or regulatory developments and takes steps to address any gaps.
  • Have a broad knowledge of the more technical aspects of other services lines – be able to spot and talk at a high level about matters outside of own service line.
  • Thinks beyond own area to develop capability.
  • Ensures that quality is beyond a minimum level, with adherence to key processes and ensuring appropriate training is undertaken.
• Commitment
  • Proactive leadership of tasks to achieve business plan.
  • Creates and maintains positive environment.
  • Able to look holistically at department to promote wellbeing, and a collaborative environment.
  • Leading by example and consistently setting high standards for professionalism and ethical behaviour.
  • Champions the Azets brand, building on our portfolio of services, values, reputation, and market profile.
• Attention to Detail
  • Encourages team to raise standards and eliminate errors.
  • Tracks and acts on quality issues.
  • Is transparent and shares information with colleagues which could benefit the business, working with the partners in the team.
  • Is aware of the skills and abilities of those around them, communicating tasks clearly with deadlines and supporting through to completion.
  • Communicates the bigger picture and objectives of an assignment and is able to strike a balance between seeking further detail and an efficient and commercial output.
  • Actively takes part in and contributes to the development of Azets quality monitoring processes in own part of the business.
• Efficiency
  • Deals effectively with conflicting objectives, priorities and agendas.
  • Leads the way with digital transformation initiatives through clear understanding of the program and embedding throughout their team.
  • Is able to critically assess effective use of time, for example ensuring all meetings have a defined purpose and agreed output.

Key accountabilities

• Decision Making
  • Takes a dynamic and flexible approach to decision making, using live data to recognise when different approaches are required.
  • Holds genuinely open discussions, listens to others views, and shows a willingness to compromise.
  • Is able to present a range of possible decision making options to stakeholders, highlighting the positive and negative implications of each to reach a decision.
  • Is able to identify and extract relevant data to support a decision from a large volume and wide range of sources.
  • Consistently demonstrates awareness and sound judgement on decisions which are able to be made autonomously and escalates those that cannot to more senior stakeholders.
• Leading People
  • Communicates direction clearly and brings colleagues along on the journey balancing business priorities and people priorities with respect.
  • Trusts and appropriately empowers team members.
  • Promotes a culture of openness and trust.
  • Actively looks for opportunities to develop others, gives responsibility to others and willingly delegates as appropriate.
  • Comfortable in voicing opinions that may conflict with the status quo.
  • Builds empathy and support to ensure buy-in and ownership of ideas.
  • Always upholds and demonstrates integrity.
• Leading Yourself
  • Is able to lead to achieve resolution of complex challenges.
  • Stays true to leadership style even when under pressure.
  • Can step outside comfort zone and actively pursues new challenges and opportunities that support the business.
  • Leads by example by openly pursuing continuous personal and professional development and demonstrates self-awareness.
  • Demonstrates resilience but is able to recognise own limitations and draws on and is accepting of support from own network when required.
• Driving Business Growth
  • Strategically develops and refines own external network and shows evidence of winning work from this network for own team and for Azets more widely.
  • Leads and builds client portfolio, demonstrating fee growth from existing services and evidence of successfully introducing new services.
  • Can identify the commercial realities of a client engagement and is able to seek agreement across service lines on approach to fee setting and fee growth.
  • Is able to articulate the value proposition for the services the team delivers to support fee growth.
  • Uses chain of indirect influence. This may include the use of technical experts to help sell a concept by adding credibility.
  • Takes the lead on ensuring minimum pricing initiatives are followed and is proactive in RRR reviews.

Living Our Values

Shows good understanding of our company values, and making good progress towards consistently demonstrating required behaviours.

Technical Skills

• Acts as an engagement lead on most corporate tax advisory assignments, for the Bicester office including some complex and larger assignments with limited support from Tax Partners.
• Able to anticipate issues and risks with tax engagements and take timely action to address these.
• The Bicester portfolio of clients has an emphasis on the software and technology sector, therefore a broad understanding of this sector would be useful.
• Has detailed knowledge and experience in tax issues that typically impact international groups operating in the UK; areas such as share options, loan relationships, thin capitalisation, group restructures, corporate interest restriction, country by country reporting etc.
• Works with other tax specialists and other service lines seamlessly to provide a joined up service to clients.
• Demonstrates appropriate oversight and responsibility as one of the main leads of the client relationship team, showing strong project management skills when required to co-ordinate teams to deliver projects.
• Proactively keeps on top of key developments across both the tax service line and the wider firm, to identify cross-selling opportunities for existing and new clients.
• Confident to discuss most areas of taxation with clients, bringing in appropriate tax specialists as appropriate and maximising cross-selling opportunities.
• Leading the way for change, innovation and technological advances within the tax department, by using the most appropriate technologies and processes for tax assignments, and demonstrating where they can improve quality and efficiencies.
• Responsible for promoting quality controls within the tax department at a regional level.
• Continuously looking for opportunities to expand both internal & external networks, both in terms of potential referrers but also opportunities to showcase the firm's service offerings (for example, presentations to external firms).

Qualifications

Holds a tax qualification or qualified by experience (e.g. ATT/CTA).

Essential Experience

It is expected that the above core and technical skills will have been developed through study alongside work experience in an accountancy practice.