Pendulum or Progress? Tax Consultants in the Crisis of Legitimacy

Abstract

After a series of scandals, the focus is now shifting to tax professionals who have received little attention so far. The paper examines how tax professionals justify their professional activities in the legitimacy crisis of tax planning. Professions have a systemic role and combine commercial interest with social benefit. In the crisis, professionals need to re-legitimize themselves by addressing core societal values in order to secure the benefits associated with professional status. Building on problem-centered qualitative interviews with 45 tax professionals from Germany, Liechtenstein, and Austria with different business models, I show that these tax professionals justify their activities in the crisis via three ideal-typical norms: selective liberal values and counterattacks, elitist shaping, and the benefits for the business location. Most professionals hope for a pendulum movement as a rollback of regulation.