Different courses types work for different people. At BetterTax, we target ADIT students who typically are working people, wanting to advance their careers and are putting in the work themselves. The fact that you are reading this, is already a strong indication that you are one of them. In addition, we aim for students who can study on their own a number of hours per week, but then also like to come together and discuss what they have learnt to deepen their understanding. Finally, we aim for students who want to apply what they learn in practice and thus value understanding the underlying mechanics of taxation over the mere memorising of facts till some time shortly after their ADIT exam. If this is who you are, we believe BetterTax is a good choice for you.
Do not confuse quality with fancy marketing, web designs, or price: you are here to study tax, not html and you are here looking for substance, not promises.
We are relatively cheaper for two reasons. First, our overhead is low. Therefore, your fees do not go to expensive office space for and salaries of a marketing team, business developers, web masters, middle managers and the like. They go straight to paying for content development and teaching only. By cutting those costs, we can cut your fees.
Second, we do not see ourselves as cheap, we see ourselves as socially responsible, whilst delivering at least the same quality as the most expensive providers out there. We aim for a global audience and what is relatively affordable in Europe (say Euro 2000), is quite expense elsewhere. We want students from all over the world, so we want to be affordable for students from everywhere. Also, we are keenly aware that many of our students pay their fees themselves, that those fees are not tax deductible for them and that they do not get any VAT refunded either. So, that is why we differentiate prices between our individual students and our prices for the companies, firms and governments we teach.
Then write us at [email protected]. We typically answer within 24 hours.
You can find the relevant data on the CIOT ADIT website. We attach the 2023 ADIT prospectus and syllabus for your convenience here below. Deadlines and registration procedures are on page 5 of the prospectus.
Download ADIT-Prospectus-2023
Download ADIT-Syllabus-2023
There are plusses and minuses. The short answer is, small is not by definition better or worse than large: it is different. At BetterTax, we believe we can compete with the best and we continuously strive to become even better.
The longer read: it helps to understand how most tax course providers and tutors work. So for starters, here are different types of tutors and course providers:
- full time tutors,
- tutors who do this on the side,
- course providers who are middlemen, and
- course providers that are tax experts and tutors themselves.
Below are some comments about each.
Tutors who do this on the side, typically are full time consultants and in a few cases inhouse tax specialists. Start by realising that 4 - 5 years of experience in consultancy, is limited experience. If those years are done in a big 4 firm, the tutor's experience may also be quite narrow, because those firms want to specialise their staff as soon as possible, to increase their rates per hour as soon as possible. The more experience your tutors have, the more they can teach you: LinkedIn is good source of information for this.
Furthermore, be aware that these tutors may try and sell you other services instead of teaching you. So, if you are in a course and your tutor tells you to contact them for more information at a fee, get up, leave and your ask your money back. There is nothing this person is going to tell you that you cannot find online yourself.
On the other hand, full time tutors may have the advantage of being better at teaching, because they get more practice. Also, they are less likely to try and sell you something (other than more courses). However, they do run the risk of becoming too theoretical if they lack recent practical experience. It is not a deal killer, but be aware of it and ask about it. Tax at its best, is a hands-on practice.
Course providers that are middlemen, are not tax experts themselves. So their focus is on finding the best tutors (in their opinion) for the cheapest price and maximising their income from students. There are some difficulties in doing this: not every good tax professional is into teaching and even if they are, their bosses may not be. Also, it often is much easier to get a tutor to do something once, than it is to get them to do it multiple times. So you may end up with tutor B, telling you what they think tutor A's slides are supposed to be saying.
In addition, really large middlemen course providers may provide multiple courses in multiple fields and impose their same house style on all their courses. This may be a good thing in some aspects, but it may also put the tutor in a straightjacket and limit their performance.
Finally, there are course providers that are tax experts and tutors themselves. We are aware of a few, but not many. You know you are their focus and that is good. Then, the next thing to look out for is their experience (see our text above about tutors).
It depends on you, your tutor, and their experience. In all cases, tutors with more experience are better than those with less (assuming both are equally good at teaching). If you have multiple tutors, you will like some more than others and technically be happier with some parts of our course than with others. If you have one (or two) tutors only, you have to make sure that you find the tutor and the tutor's style of teaching agreeable to you. Look at demo videos of their classes, or attend a trail classes if they them.
At BetterTax we have one tutor who is a tax expert for both courses. Johann Muller has more than 30 years experience at the highest level in consultancy, in-house, and government. He worked in Amsterdam, London, New York and Copenhagen. He also authored of many articles, published books with the IBFD, is an editor of KluwerLaw's PE+ database, and is an international speaker.
Furthermore, Mr. Muller worked with structured finance and hybrids (before BEPS), and M&A as consultant and as a barrister. He also worked in shipping, logistics, oil & gas, tobacco, med tech and pharma, and in renewable energy as in-house tax specialist in groups that are world leaders in their fields. Finally, he worked as case handler for the Danish competent authority for transfer pricing and was one of Denmark's representatives at the OECD before and during BEPS.
Finally, Johann shares these experiences in his classes. It makes a difference whether e.g. you tell someone what the Transfer Pricing Guidelines say (which any one can do), or you explain how to individually price 5000 different products for group distributors in 50 countries and still keep within a 3% wide interquartile arm's length range.
To conclude, we do not believe being small effects our quality in a negative way. We are happy to refer to recommendations from our previous students.
