Outside the MBA: The Highest Paying STEM Management Degrees
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Continue reading…How This Saïd MBA Grad Is Helping Destroy Tax Jargon
“If you could deduct a dollar for every word of jargon on your tax return, chances are, you would owe a lot less tax.”
Those words, published in the New York Times, could realistically have been written in 2016. But this notion of an incredibly common public nuisance was published in 1984. And more than 30 years later, not much has changed.
The typical annotation surrounding tax jargon is littered with brash profanities, and for good reason: filing taxes can be nauseatingly frustrating, and the endlessly wordiness that comes with it only makes it worse. Luckily, that mired pessimism is pretty universally shared, and some—like University of Oxford Saïd Business School MBA ‘16 graduate Connie Cha—are actually helping.
This week, Cha launched Taxforward, a simplified tax self-assessment system that allows U.K. residents to more easily understand how to file in what Cha calls “the new economy.”
Speaking with the Saïd Business School, Cha illuminated what led her to the project. Trained as an actress, Cha graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London before joining the business school. And like so many, when she first had to file her own taxes she “was completely in the dark about how to complete it.”
After joining Deloitte as a member of the consumer business audit team, she began to more thoroughly understand the tax system. But those initial difficulties made a lasting impression. Cha earned her chartered accountancy qualification (ACA) at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. And after beginning her pursuit of an MBA at Saïd, she refined what eventually became Taxforward.
With her entrepreneurship project team, Cha found herself looking into what could be considered an non-traditional market: the freelance and sharing economy. A trained actress herself, Cha was deftly familiar with creative types who were working more independently than as traditional full-time employees—something she found increasingly common even among larger employers.
“There has been a shift in how organizations are structuring their operations for cost-efficiency,” she says. “Big corporations, such as Deloitte, are taking on independent contractors alongside employees, and individuals are building their livelihood through a company vehicle rather than a typical employment contract.”
Working with her entrepreneurship project mentor, retail marketing associate professor and deputy dean Jonathan Reynolds, and the Oxford alumni network, Cha continued refining Taxforward after completing her MBA. The completed effort, crafted in a pleasant, clean design, allows U.K. users to quickly file their returns for a nominal flat rate competitively smaller than most accountants charge.
“To stand out we want to give users a feeling of empowerment that they can do it themselves,” she says. “In short, we want to be the tax partner to the new economy.”
If the project is successful, it’s not hard to imagine expansion into international markets. Or at least until other ventures capitalize on Cha’s ingenuity. Head over to Taxforward now to take a look at the recently launched product.
