The Moment You Realize the System Wasn't Designed for You
An interview with the tax authority teaches you more about your work than a decade of advice.
The Moment You Realize the System Wasn't Designed for You
The system isn't badly built. It's well built for someone else.
I once sat in a room with two tax authority officials. They had questions. About my business. About my structure. About why. Not aggressive, but standardized. They had a checklist.
What became clear in that moment was this: the system isn't built to help you. It's built to control you. And more: it's built for standard cases. For someone with one job, one home, two kids, retirement at 67.
Everyone operating outside that, everyone building assets, everyone creating structures to manage money more efficiently, they stumble against the system. Not because they're wrong. Because the system wasn't written for them.
And here's the core problem: if you're building an enterprise, if you're building Florian, if you're structuring through Estonia, you're by definition in unknown territory. The officials have no precedent. They don't clearly understand what they're controlling. They follow procedures. And procedures favor the state.
When I looked those two people in the eye, I felt anger. Not at them. At the system that put them there. These are people doing their job. But their job is designed around control, not stimulation. Around risk minimization, not growth.
The Netherlands taxes heavily. Germany taxes heavily. France taxes heavily. But none of them stimulate what they claim to want. They tax profit. They tax dividends. They tax growth. What they do is: they scare entrepreneurs.
This contrasts with Estonia. There, the tax code was written by engineers, not bureaucrats. It's built for speed, digitalization, growth. The state doesn't create obstacles. The state creates conditions.
This causes entrepreneurs who want to do smart things to go to Estonia. Not because they're avoiding Dutch money. Because they want to grow. And the Netherlands lets them go.
The anger I felt in that room wasn't because I was wrong. It was because I saw how the system is built: not for my growth, but for my limitation.
Sources: Belastingdienst procedures and regulations (2024); Various audit case studies
Source: Personal case studies; Dutch Tax Authority (Belastingdienst) procedures documentation