We asked our stakeholders to challenge us on our work

Should we at the Tax Justice Network be doing more to engage with organisations in the global south? Should we be focusing more on high-level advocacy or talking more about progressive taxes instead of tax avoidance? These questions and more were put to us at our organisational retreat this spring by sector peers, network members and funders.

Each year, the Tax Justice Network invites a range of stakeholders to present us with a “challenge” to our current work and goals to discuss at our team retreat. The aim is to help us consider our work from different perspectives, to identify new avenues we could be exploring or to emphasise the importance of continuing work on specific issues. All in all, it helps keep us on our toes.

The “challenges” presented to us this year were:

• The Tax Justice Network should do more to engage with organisations in the global south, made by Latindadd
• The Tax Justice Network should do more to shape the next generation international tax system, by analysing more ‘second best’ solutions and thus increasing our influence on OECD and other global processes, made by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)
• The Tax Justice Network should do more northern high-level advocacy on our key policy asks, made by the Ford Foundation and the FACT Coalition
• The Tax Justice Network should develop credible and high-quality research to help guide tax justice campaigns, made by Sol Picciotto, emeritus professor of law at Lancaster University, coordinator of the BEPS Monitoring Group and Tax Justice Network senior adviser
• The Tax Justice Network should contribute to rethinking financial accounting and audit, and how it relates to financial secrecy and tax injustice, made by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)
• The Tax Justice Network should stop focusing primarily on tackling tax avoidance and evasion and make a broad case for progressive taxes, for example smarter taxes on wealth, made by Tax Justice UK

For each challenge made at our retreat, we broke out into smaller teams to discuss and write down both ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments. The teams then came together to discuss and craft a unified response. You can read our responses here. We welcome all comments on these challenges and our responses to them.

Thank you to our sector peers, network members and funders for presenting us with these helpful, thought-provoking challenges.