People who can afford tax advisors have the ability to pay less in taxes than the rest of us. This doesn’t seem fair. So we are going to see if we can do something about it.

We want to teach everyone how to legally pay as little tax as possible

We want to tell everyone in the Netherlands how they can legally pay as little taxes as possible. We’re excited to be able to try this out in ‘tax haven’ the Netherlands, and this is also a country native to some of us.

If you have a lot of money, you can hire people that use loopholes and complex structures in the tax law which allow you to pay less tax. This journalistic project wants to research how everyone — ordinary citizens — can become a member of ‘the Society of Tax Evaders’ by showing them the legal loopholes in the tax laws and give them personalized advice wherever this applies for him/her.

We want to make an interactive website that explains legal, complex dodging strategies and that makes them easy to understand.

A site where you can learn about how you can pay as little tax as possible without breaking the law. Just as the rich do. Important to note is that we are not against paying taxes as such — for it has its good purposes — but want to shed light on the gap between the rich paying almost nothing, and the rest of us everything else.

‘The Society of Tax Avoiders’

The name of our project is a poetic nod to the illuminati. We love to imagine that all tax avoiders be members of this secret society.

Membership is obtained by doing something specific to the purpose of paying less tax. So chances are that you, or at least a lot of people you know, are already member of ‘The Society’. We want to share with our members how they can pay less tax and how everyone could use this to his or her advantage — thus making them members as well.

We are not against paying tax, our goal with the expansion of this society is to force changing the current inequality in tax legislation.

This investigative journalistic project is there to teach ordinary citizens how they can become a member of this society and give them free and custom advice. We’re democratizing legal tax avoidance.

In the coming weeks we’ll start with this project, including blogging about the progress we’re making. Probably more often in Dutch than in English but we’ll be sure not to leave you hanging!

You can follow us and our research at ontduikers.nl.

Because if politics doesn’t want to make taxes fairer, we have to do that ourselves.