Aleksandar Ivanovski ( Macedonian: Александар Ивановски) is a Belgian - Macedonian lawyer academic and EU legal expert. Ivanovski introduced the phrase “grey zone” used in European tax policy.

Education and career

Ivanovski studied law at

Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje The Saints Cyril and Methodius University () is a public university, public research university in Skopje, North Macedonia. It is the oldest and largest public university in the country. It is named after the Byzantine Empire, Byzantine Christ ...

. He holds an

LLM A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with Self-supervised learning, self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially Natural language generation, language g ...

degree from the University of Amsterdam and a PhD from

Queen Mary University of London Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, or informally QM, and formerly Queen Mary and Westfield College) is a public university, public research university in Mile End, East London, England. It is a member institution of the federal University ...

on the principle of equal treatment in EU tax and State aid law. Ivanovski serves as director of CFE Tax Advisers Europe. He previously worked as tax inspector.

European tax policy

Ivanovski’s academic research is centered around tax and EU State aid rules, specifically the way State aid rules apply to individual tax deals by national authorities. He is a frequent commentator on European tax rulings, such as Apple's EU tax dispute, on

VAT A value-added tax (VAT or goods and services tax (GST), general consumption tax (GCT)) is a consumption tax that is levied on the value added at each stage of a product's production and distribution. VAT is similar to, and is often compared wi ...

and tax fraud as well as questions of tax transparency, such as :de:Public Country-by-Country-Reporting. Advising on the prospective accession of his home country

North Macedonia North Macedonia, officially the Republic of North Macedonia, is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe. It shares land borders with Greece to the south, Albania to the west, Bulgaria to the east, Kosovo to the northwest and Serbia to the n ...

to the EU, Ivanovski insisted on the importance of transparency in providing state subsidies to companies and on committing to sustainable investment policies.

Ethics for tax advisors

Ivanovski is a member of the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

Platform for Tax Good Governance, as independent expert on tax policy. He represents CFE Tax Advisers Europe in discussions on sustainable green transition. In 2022, Ivanovski coined the phrase “grey zone” in the conversation on the need to regulate the tax advisors’ profession. He put forward that it would not be sufficient for the European Union to outlaw blatantly illegal misconduct because tax planning takes place in such grey zones. Ivanovski raised the question of important national differences within the EU in the attitude of citizens to tax. He has been advocating in favor of ethical standards to be set for the tax advisors’ profession and to be included in the university program forming tax advisors.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ivanovski, Aleksandar Living people Macedonian lawyers Tax lawyers European Union tax law Year of birth missing (living people) University of Amsterdam alumni