Why a European Tax College?

Professor Peter Essers and
Professor Frans Vanistendael,
College Directors
  The first and foremost reason for establishing a European Tax College has been the dramatic change through 'globalisation' in the basic principles of national taxation. Tax globalisation has a number of aspects:
1 the widening wave of global tax reform along the lines of the US tax reform of 1985;
2 the process of tax integration in the European Union through legislation, guidelines, and judgements by the European Court of Justice;
3 the access of former communist countries to Western tax systems;
4 the world-wide acceptance of VAT as the system of indirect taxation; and
5 the growing impact of tax systems on international trade in goods and services, and vice versa. 		 

 

 

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These trends have led to a much more global view on taxation, in which national tax systems are both compared and confronted with one another.

Secondly, there has been an explosion of postgraduate Master's courses in taxation, which, however, in most cases have an exclusive national focus and a rather traditional educational concept.

All this has resulted in demand for a well-structured postgraduate tax training programme for students who have completed their basic university education and want to specialize in taxation (professional expertise is not required) and young professionals at a reasonable cost.

In order to meet this demand, the Tax Institutes of the K.U. Leuven in Belgium and of Tilburg University in the Netherlands have together established the European Tax College. This institution is truly international in its organisation, its staff, and its student body. Its locations (Leuven, near Brussels and Tilburg in the Netherlands) have been chosen to allow the maximum participation of staff and students from surrounding countries and for them to benefit from the expertise of the European institutions. Its curriculum is unique in that it focuses on problems, rather than on disciplines, and the didactic concept includes discussion and sharing of experience among equals rather than one-way dissemination of knowledge. The main purpose of the European Tax College is to provide a Advanced Master in European and International Taxation after one year of full-time study, or a part-time course lasting two years. A selection of one or more courses that do not lead to a degree is also available on request.