The case for a career in Indirect Tax

My son is four and a half, and his answer to what he wants to be when he grows up changes daily, but it has ranged from ambulance driver to Garda (police man for my non Irish friends) and back again, and the pattern I've noticed is that the common thread isn't public service at all, it's the flashing lights. Indirect tax professional hasn't come up yet by the way, but, it's that time of year, when the graduate programs start and all the firms and companies are onboarding a new cohort of associates. A lot of smart 22 year olds are about to pick a tax head almost by accident and then stay in it for a few decades, so here's the case for indirect tax, not as the thing you fall into after corporate tax doesn't work out, but as a genuinely good first choice that travels a lot further than most people assume. I think governments are moving away from taxing profit and towards taxing revenue and activity, and the tech sector is where that's happening first. VAT is where every indirect conversation starts but I want to give a flavour first of other areas we take interest in. In August, Congressman Greg Casar and colleagues introduced the AI Tax and Work Protection Act in the US House, which would impose an excise tax on businesses that develop, sell access to, or modify foundation models, calculated as the greater of a percentage of the fair market value of tokens processed or a percentage of consideration received for covered AI services, with the rate rising if U4 unemployment climbs above 5%. It's a proposal rather than a law, and I genuinely don't know whether it goes anywhere, but somebody in every affected business is eventually going to have to source, calculate and defend a tax on tokens processed, and that somebody is not going to be sitting in the corporate tax planning team. Italy gave us a live version of the same idea this year rather than a proposal, when its 2026 Budget Law widened an existing telecoms contribution paid to AGCOM, the communications regulator, into a levy on a broad sweep of digital, media and platform revenue, including revenue booked outside Italy where it relates to Italian activity, with no offset against VAT or the existing digital services tax and no fixed sourcing methodology to fall back on, so businesses are left applying their own reasonable, auditable approach to work out what actually counts as Italian revenue. I want to write a longer piece on that one alone at some point, because it's a decent preview of what an activity-based tax looks like once a real tax authority has to sit down and administer it (the current draft is less than tasteful!). None of this is a new idea, to be fair, since indirect taxes have always done double duty as a behavioural lever as much as a revenue raising one, and there's a decent, slightly ridiculous back catalogue to prove it. Ireland's plastic bag levy in 2002 is the example everyone reaches for because it changed consumer habits almost overnight. England's window tax ran from 1696 to 1851 and charged households by the number of windows they had, which led people to brick theirs up rather than pay, a decision plenty of Georgian buildings across Britain and Ireland are still visibly wearing today. Denmark tried a tax on saturated fat in October 2011, adding roughly €2.15 per kilo of saturated fat (for those interested it would have added about €250 to the price my wife paid for me when we met if it was a tax in Ireland in the late 2000s) to products like butter, cheese and meat, and repealed it fifteen months later once it became clear that Danes were simply driving across the border to Germany to buy their butter tax-free, which hollowed out both the health objective and the revenue at the same time. And Mexico is running a more instructive, and considerably messier, version of the same story right now, having passed an 8% excise on violent and adult video games as part of its 2026 budget, due to take effect on 1 January, only for the President to issue a decree on New Year's Eve granting a 100% fiscal credit against it, once the government worked out that it couldn't practically classify games by violence level at any real scale. Working in indirect tax inside a business means you see the commercial activity end to end, but at line level, caring about what was invoiced, where the customer sat, and where you sold from, which pulls you towards technology fairly naturally, because you need to understand how all of that actually happens inside the systems that record it. eInvoicing is the clearest current example of this, since it's a technology project in every meaningful sense, run by technology people on a technology budget, but the indirect tax team is still who picks up the phone when a tax authority has a query about it, so you end up owning the outcome without owning the budget that produced it, which some days is the best part of the job and some days very much is not. On the accounting exams and qualifications, a lot of people I know in Irish indirect tax are qualified accountants and / or tax consultants as its generally how training works here but even if you are not based in Ireland I cannot stress the benefits of doing professional accounting exams as it's worth doing partly for the credibility it lends to your CV, but it also gives you a great understanding of how transactions actually work, how to understand financial statements and how systems work. There's also a smaller, newer category worth knowing about, tax technology certifications aimed specifically at giving tax people a working vocabulary for data and systems, and e-Bright's belt-based programme is one I've come across, though I've no relationship with any provider and no strong view on which is best, since the category itself is worth your attention even where the specific course isn't, and you don't need to become an engineer so much as stop nodding blankly when one is in the room explaining how a system actually works. And never turn your nose up at compliance work, which tends to get treated as the unglamorous prerequisite you serve before the real job starts, and I think that's exactly backwards, because if you're responsible for even a few hundred returns a year, it isn't a task with quiet patches at all but a constant low hum of things that need to be right, and getting good at managing that hum teaches you more about how a business actually runs than most strategy work ever will. It's also shifting shape faster than people give it credit for. I remember one job i have early in my career where we were still printing a sales ledger extract from SAP on the third working day of every month purely to reconcile it by hand against the VAT return, because nobody quite trusted the automated feed yet, and that kind of manual checkpoint is disappearing everywhere I look now, so the job in a few years looks less like preparing the return and more like watching the systems that prepare it, sitting across invoicing and AP data, and going and finding out why a number spiked or dropped somewhere it shouldn't have. Indirect tax rules tend to get written for scale, which means there's usually a logic you can follow even through the genuinely maddening exceptions that VAT in particular is full of, financial services, reduced rates, special schemes and all the rest of it, and that's part of the appeal rather than a contradiction of it, because you're dealing with a system messy enough to be interesting and structured enough to actually reason your way through, which is a different kind of satisfying than corporate tax planning tends to be in my experience. I've a follow-up piece in mind where I give my opinion on where the next generation of heads of tax will actually come from, but I value my present friendships in tax so I will keep it to myself until I have a few scores to settle in the future.