Taxes are eternally a pain to do and maintain over the years, but outside of the United States, other countries are shifting gears in order to make everyone’s lives a whole lot easier. Countries like Croatia have adopted the practice of progressive taxation, as well as new technologies for taxation that keep the system running smoothly. Dr. Diane Hamilton speaks to Dame Of Honour Kesnija Cipek, who works at the Republic of Croatia’s Ministry of Finance in the Tax Administration. Together, they take a look at new technological solutions on the taxation front, and how these might benefit other countries that haven’t picked them up yet.
I’m so glad you joined us because we have Dame of Honour Ksenija Cipek here. She is an International Tax Expert, Lawmaker and Project Leader at the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Croatia. We’re going to talk interesting tax-related issues.
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Keeping Up With Taxation Technologies With Dame Of Honour Ksenija Cipek
I am here with Dame of Honour Ksenija Cipek. She works with the Ministry of Finance Tax Administration of the Republic of Croatia. She is a highly respected and recognized international tax expert who’s heavily involved in lawmaking and has been responsible for many of the tax reforms in Croatia. She is involved as Head of Tax Risk Analysis and the future development of Compliance Risk Analysis Systems. She also deals with new technology like blockchain and a lot of very interesting things that I can’t wait to talk to her about. Welcome to the show. Can I call you Ksenija?
Yes, thank you very much for inviting me, Dr. Hamilton. I’m pleased to have the opportunity.
This is an honor for me to have you here. It was nice of Martin to introduce us. This is a little bit of a different show than what I usually do because we don’t do a lot about taxes. You get into some of the unusual aspects, which a lot of people are going to want to know more about in terms of blockchain, technology and tax coin, I want to get into that. Can you give me a little background? How did you get to be Dame of Honour and get to this level of success?
This is a personal story. I have two damehoods, one from Spain and another from Rome. It’s because of my achievement, humanitarian work and some of my expertise. I’m deeply involved in taxation and law-making. I also like to help people. I try to do my best in every aspect of my life and people recognize that.
It’s quite an honor. You’ve done a lot of amazing things for women in leadership in Croatia. I’m curious how it varies from what you’ve seen in other countries like in the United States. Do you see more or fewer women in power positions as you have there than in the United States?
No. I think it’s similar. In Croatia, the ladies and the woman could achieve a lot but behind that is a lot of work and education every day. I educate myself every day. It’s not impossible. As in any other countryman, it is a little bit better position but it’s not impossible. Its hard work behind. If you have some visions, ideas and you developed some things, every door will be opened. No matter if you are in Europe, Croatia or the United States.
[bctt tweet=”The tax system in Croatia differs from that of the United States.” via=”no”]Taxes are a very interesting area for you to focus on. What was the attraction of going into that?
I started to work in tax administration many years ago and I follow every step and level in the tax Administration. At one moment, taxes started to be very interesting for me especially when I have been involved very deeply in lawmaking. It could be an art. You have a tax policy that’s the government part. You can do your best and putting the law, bylaw or some binding rulings. That will be new and good for the taxpayers and the tax administration. We should look at us as partners, not as enemies. That was interesting for me.
You do a lot of very interesting things and I’m curious about how the tax system in Croatia differs from the United States. I’ve worked with Steve Forbes here. Forbes is quite a big name because he ran for president at one time and his platform was the flat tax. We’ve never had a flat tax here but a lot of people are interested in the potential of that. Why do you think that we don’t go with flat taxes?
First of all, between Croatia and the United States, we are a member state of the European Union. Before that, we have different systems in the field of indirect taxes. We have VATs, so you don’t have that right now. We have progressive taxation in the field of income tax. A flat tax is something people look at that in a way that is not correct that anyone pays the same amount of taxes. If you are a billionaire or you have some average income salary as a worker, you will have the same tax rate. The amount will not be the same but the tax rate will be. Progressive taxation has much higher tax rates for the different tax bases. It means that you will pay or somebody will pay more taxes depending on the economic strength of the person.
Some countries have this progressive taxation in the constitution. Flat taxes right now are not common in countries. If we are talking about the results of taxation, a flat tax has some advantages. It’s much simpler. If you have 3, 4, 5, in some countries 7 or 8 tax rates, that’s a complex tax system. Collecting taxes is complicated. The tax burden of the tax administration to collect these taxes, the costs are higher. That’s the advantage of the flat tax. We always have to think about the possibilities. What should be better for both sides, for the state budget and the taxpayers? We will see.
I remember talking to Steve Forbes about it and he was saying it would eliminate a lot of jobs as well. A lot of people didn’t like that. Do you think that would have that impact on the government?
It could be because rich people will pay the same tax rate as the average worker. It’s not something that in your ears will be nice to hear but behind that, taxes are exact things. It could be that the effect will be good at the end but it does not sound very nice. That’s my opinion.
You mentioned the VAT. Can you explain that for people here in the United States since we don’t have that?
You have the sales tax, so this is an indirect tax. If you buy some goods or use some services, you will pay VAT sometimes. I would like to say to my students that sometimes we are paying VAT under the anesthesia because you don’t see and you will pay for some things you don’t see this 15%, 20% or 25% of the VAT. If we are talking about the income tax and salaries then you will see very fast every cent and every Euro in your pocket. This is the difference. This is different from income tax and direct taxes. In your country is the sales tax.
Technologies For Taxation: Croatia uses progressive taxation, which means that people pay more or less taxes depending on their economic strength.
I’ve had people ask me about that when they’ve bought things from me from other countries. A lot of people here don’t realize what it is. I appreciate you answering that. I know you deal with a lot of technology and how it impacts the tax system. There’s something that I found interesting and it’s called a tax coin. You wrote an article about that. Can you talk about tax coin and what are the benefits of using that?
We are talking about hypothetical tax coin. This is not something that works at this moment but we should move on and start to think about what is happening around us. That includes tax administration also. We are in the digital era so we cannot see it and say nothing has happened. A lot of things are happening. The tax administration should be ready at this time to accept all the challenges post by digital evolution. The tax administration can be expected to act actively. That’s important in thinking, testing and proposing new solutions in collaboration with academics. We tax expert communities, blockchain technology experts, other stakeholders and most important of these are taxpayers. What does that mean?
If we are talking about tax legislation, this is not exclusively now for the lawyers because part of digging between legislation and technology is already shifting. Sometimes, some technology solution will have a direct impact on how your law provision will look like. As a legislator, we should have attention on that. What is happening in the field of technology? About the tax coin, many tax administration analyzing contesting some part of using blockchain, distributed ledger technology, gifts or have some pilot project. One all of the proposals is a hypothetical tax coin. The initial concept is from the VAT coin. The concept was introduced by Richard Ainsworth, Musaad Alwohaibi and Mike Cheetham in paper VATCoin and the GCC cryptocurrency.
It was designed as a proposal for the Gulf Cooperation Council. When I started to think about that, I saw that this is an interesting concept and we can go step ahead. It could be a further development of this concept, not only for VAT but for all taxes on an international level such as the European Union, countries in South America or the Federal States in the United States. Everything is possible. The most important goal of the tax coin is not a cryptocurrency, this is a virtual coin which prefaces exactly just one, to pay the taxes. The main goal is to prevent tax fraud and tax avoidance especially in the field of VAT but we can put that in the frame of every taxes.
If you’re paying the taxes by tax coin, the base is blockchain technology and smart contracts. It will be not so interesting for you to steal the coin, which I could follow because we are in the blockchain. I know that you buy from the government $10,000 worth of the coins and now, you have $1 million, that’s not normal. The possibilities of fraud are not so big. If you see the money, you will start to think, “I will make some tax fraud or carousel fraud and steal this money.” If you see tax coin, this is not so interesting for taxpayers to steal that. It is something like that. It is just in my mind. What’s important is that this is a big step ahead to start to think about that. As I said, the concept is from GCC.
It’s a good concept and we should start to think we can use that in some pilot or testing. Right now, I’m working on that as a study because blockchain has many advantages for the tax administration but also, it’s a very important consensus mechanism because anonymity is not acceptable for any tax matters from the side of the tax administration. Using smart contracts and the blockchain could be a very good direction to exploring that. We cannot stop that because of technological development from day-to-day. For something like that, I am not an engineer but I start to think that I need a special consensus mechanism and special blockchain.
It is nice to explore what would be like this mechanism. It should be proof of identity or proof of state or something like that. It’s a lot of things that we can use. I will not say 100% stop but 99% stop the tax fraud because the tax gap everywhere in the world, the European Union also, is measured in the millions and billions of Euros and US dollars. We should do something about that. It’s nice that whatever and when such a solution will be implemented that will show time. New studies will take into account all the advantages and disadvantages of this solution. I like it. That’s my opinion. We should move in that way.
Anything that’s kept through blockchain is interesting. I’ve had some blockchain experts on the show. When you were talking about this tax coin, you’re talking about specifically made just to pay taxes. As you said, it’s not money for other things. Anything of value if you could pay taxes with it, would it be able for somebody to take it and sell it to somebody else so they could use it? Is it so tracked because of the blockchain technology that would be impossible?
That’s tracked from the blockchain technology. Now, nothing is impossible but it will be very hard. That’s my opinion.
[bctt tweet=”Blockchain technology could help us minimize or stop sophisticated tax fraud.” via=”no”]It’s interesting to think of the whole blockchain whether it’s Bitcoin or they’re using for financial reasons. Do you think that we’ll ever see one currency that’s all tracked through blockchain or do you think we’ll continue to have the American dollar, the Euro and different things? If we have blockchain, how much will governments want to be the ones being the main one and avoiding letting it be outside of government control?
I have my opinion about that. It’s hard to say. In the European Union, many countries have a common currency. We have a Euro, for example. Theoretically, the whole world may have one currency. My opinion is that we are moving to a cashless society. Some number of the real coin of the money will be always around because of people like that. This is some kind of national identities. Maybe one day but I don’t see that right now. Blockchain could assure a lot of things because it is immutable. What is very interesting for the tax administration is the characteristics of the blockchain. One of the characteristics is that we can get the data in real-time. Why is that? One main rule should be that in the data warehouse or the tax administration should be the data that we used. We are not collectors of data. We have data and data warehouse and that’s it. We have to use that data.
If I need some data from you for example, you will ask me, “Why do you need that?” You will use that for something. I think blockchain could assure that the data is immutable. That’s very important for us. This is real-time because we like to collect the data in real-time because the tax fraud is so sophisticated that it’s happening in a few hours. We have to be fast. Tax audit is not as we see tax audit ten years before. We have to be very fast because the fraudsters are very fast. For that, we have to have tools. In my opinion, blockchain and distributed ledger technology with their characteristics should help us so. Like any other country, we look and analyze that. We try to give the benefits of this technology. This does not benefit only the tax administration. This is for the benefit of the taxpayers.
Taxpayers are not satisfied that they are paying taxes and somebody is not. We have a very good perspective on the new technology that we see right now in the digital era. We have artificial intelligence. Machine learning is very interesting also. We use and developed some tools like predictive analytics. We would like to prevent things. That’s a very important goal of the tax administration, not repression but prevention. It’s to see and to have the opportunity to recognize the behavior of the taxpayers who could make the fraud before the fraud happened. That’s the point of technology. That’s a good tool for us and we should develop that in any part, not only in tax administration procedures but also in the tax system. If the tax system is simple, we will have much more compliant taxpayers.
You’re talking about important things. Being proactive is important. As the speed of everything changes, you mentioned sophisticated tax fraud. Do you have examples of some of the more blatant problematic stories of tax fraud that you think that some of these new technologies could have prevented?
Yes. As I said, we don’t have this system based on the blockchain doesn’t as I know exist in Estonia or some parts but it is in testing and analyzing phase. I’m sure that technology could help us to stop or minimize fraud. For example, in Croatia, I was a project leader on this project. It was one of the largest projects of the tax administration. The base is not a blockchain but could be is a compliance risk management system. What does that mean? We have more than 600 risks for every kind of tax. The system recognized based on these risks which taxpayers are risky and which are not. We would like to focus our repressive instrument as a tax audit.
This is the most expensive instrument of the tax administration on the high-risk taxpayers. The compliant taxpayers, the system will show which taxpayers are the good ones. We don’t have to have any repressive measures for them. We would like that they do their business, they don’t spend the time with the tax administration because they are good. There are a lot of legal measures as horizontal monitoring or advanced price agreements for the transfer pricing. There are some agreements between taxpayers and the tax administration. That’s very nice sound agreements between taxpayers and the tax administration.
It could be very nice because if you have this agreement, the 99% tax audit will be not triggered. This is some kind of partner relationship with the compliant taxpayers and the tax administration. Our compliance risk management system could make the classification of the taxpayers in predefined risk categories based on their behavior. The system is much more transparent. The taxpayer will not depend on the decision of some tax auditor. Everything is transparent. I don’t see now any more than tax administration without a risk management system. It’s very important. The Creation Compliance Risk Management System opened our eyes. We saw that with the data that we collect in the data warehouse that we can use that data for an automatic VAT refund.
That’s a nice thing. In the 30 days, if you submit your declaration and you have a right for a tax VAT refund, you will get the money on your account if you are a compliant taxpayer. The system will recognize that. You will get your tax refund in your account without any manual work from the tax administration officials. That’s the possibilities of the technologies in the era we live. Especially leveled above that is using the blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology. I’m sure that a system, the system of predictive analytics or prescriptive analytics should use these benefits of the blockchain and VAT.
Technologies For Taxation: A compliance risk management system could place taxpayers in various predefined risk categories based on their taxpaying behavior.
It is interesting to see some of the things that can speed up the process or fix some of these issues of safety, hacking, frauds or whatever. I’m curious how much you see with sales reduced numbers from the phantom-ware, zappers and that kind of thing. Is that continuing?
I don’t think so. These kinds of things are also every day much more sophisticated. We follow that and my experience is it’s a little bit less now but the security of the whole system in the tax administration especially data warehouse should be on a high level. It is in every tax administration. It’s not easy but it’s always possible to do something like that. Because of that, we are trying our best to stop that before that happened. In many countries, it is the same. I’m sure in the United States, it’s the same situation. If you if are looking for 10 or 20 years ago, we are in virtual worlds. We have but it’s less and less. We have these online platforms. We are talking about digital tax. The way of doing business, new business models are different.
Before we have a permanent establishment, for example, some office with a desk and chair and that’s it. Now, we have a virtual permanent establishment. It’s something in the air. We have been preparing for that. We have legislation for that. When I’m looking at a digital tax that some international and global approach is much easier. I have a very nice conference in the United States because I’m a member of the Government Blockchain Association. In this event, when I spend time in Washington, DC, I read your constitution. I remember one very nice and beautiful sentence which said, “One nation, one constitution, one destiny.” I started to think, we are not one nation but for tax purposes, we are doing the same thing. Croatian Tax Administration and IRS in the United States or Tax Administration in Finland are doing the same work. Collecting that taxes and trying the best to stop the fraud.
For these purposes, it will be easier than we have some international and global approach. It will be easier for businesses. You can imagine if you have a company in Croatia, in the European Union and the United States and we have different legislation. It’s much more complicated. It will be easier that there is some global approach. In the European Union, we have legislation and directives for the automatic exchange of information. That’s good because we have to cooperate, not only in the European Union because we are doing the same work. Then I started to think, is it enough?
When we exchange the information, it takes time. It will be easier than we have direct access to the data from another country. You can imagine the situation. The tax administration in Croatia has access to the data warehouse in your IRS or the opposite. The IRS has direct access to the data in the Croatian Tax Administration. It looks very strange but for tax fraud, it will be much faster and easier to get information. Everything should have a legal framework but this will be much faster. The speed will be excellent. We start to think that way.
When we’re talking about different ways of thinking and looking at things, I want to look at this from a taxpayer’s perspective because a lot of people are thinking about their taxes that they’re paying. I watched a movie called The Power of Zero which was based on the US and how high our level of debt is here. That was discussing what’s going to happen with our interest rates and how much will be taxed over the course of time because we’ll have to pay back all this money. The tax rate will inevitably go up according to this creation of this movie and the people behind that.
They’re saying that if you’re in a traditional IRA right now, since you haven’t paid taxes on it yet, all the taxes are the lowest that they think they’ll be that it’s a good time to move over to a Roth IRA. Pay your taxes now, so that when you’re old and you take your money out later, your taxes are already paid. That’s a burden now but it’s better than the higher burden later. Are you dealing with issues like that in Croatia? Do you think that that’s a good way to go for people who are reading this and have a lot of money in a traditional IRA? Would you have suggested that switching over to a Roth would be better?
It’s hard to say that because they are two different systems. From the perspective of the taxpayers, taxes don’t have exact purposes. They are revenue of the state budget or local budget. That’s different from the mandatory contributions. That’s the real purpose of your pensions and health insurance. Every government would like to have tax rates which will be not too high because, what is the purpose? The purpose of taxes is not to punish the people. If you have a good economy, the taxes will be less. If the state budget needs the revenue for some public expenditure, it will be much higher but it shouldn’t be punishment. If I look at that, the main roles of the tax administration, it is not only the role of timely collecting the taxes.
We have a parallel role that we are of service to the taxpayers and citizens. That’s very important. Sometimes, we forget about that but we are of service to the citizens and the taxpayers not for advising or giving advice for tax planning for example. We have to make the taxpayers take that burden much easier. Every government would like to achieve that. Heavy taxation is not a goal that will bring any benefits to any government. When we are talking about taxes, it is the result of the economy of the country. We have the economy, we have a market, we have manufacturing producing and the results of all of that are the tax system. I could not say that if I’m paying a lot of taxes now, it will be easier tomorrow. I will have to study that.
[bctt tweet=”Taxes don’t exist to punish people. They are essential for public expenditure.” via=”no”]It is an interesting discussion and nobody can predict the economy. As you’re in Croatia and we were talking a little before the show, do you expect a big impact on economies there and throughout the world because of the current Coronavirus? Is this something people are talking to you about?
Yes, I expect that. I don’t know how heavy this impact will be. It depends on the country. If we are focused on tourism, Croatia is a very nice and famous tourist destination, we will have an impact and other countries too, transport and everything. We have to be prepared for that because I saw on the news that more and more people are going sick. That’s not something that will be stopped tomorrow. I will be happy if that stopped tomorrow but I don’t know if that will happen. The impact of the economy on GDP will be there for sure in every country.
It’s going to be a tough time right now with all of that. You have shared a lot of insight into some of the technologies. A lot of people weren’t familiar with tax coins specifically which is an interesting thing that I’m going to be watching the progress of. A lot of people are interested in learning more. Do have people follow you on social media? Is there some site or something you would like share for people to reach you or some site you think that they should check out?
I published in Croatia a lot of things. I’m publishing on some websites but some of my articles are on LinkedIn. I should say my special thanks in this article about tax coins that belong to my very good friend and colleague, Mr. Sean Brizendine from the United States, he’s an expert for the blockchain. When I spoke with him, we get this idea to write something together. The initial concept and the original concept are from the countries of the GCC, but I think that we can move in that field. I have many articles about taxation and technology. I conclude that disparities between legislation and technologies are shifting. That something very important for a legislator. They could reach me on LinkedIn, Facebook or any social media.
It’s very important that we exchange and share our knowledge with each other. Mr. Sean Brizendine and I are a very good example of how we can work together. We are completely different. I’m a tax expert and he is a blockchain expert. A professor Dr. Manuel Ferreira from Portugal, he’s a real expert for the economy and I’m for taxation. People from different professions should write and bring some new ideas and visions. It’s not something that tax experts and I will talk only with the people who are in taxes. That’s not true. We have a much wider picture if we have benefited from this technology. I liked it. I will be very happy that we started to use this technology much more than it is right now.
I love that because that ties into everything I researched with curiosity and I like that everybody looks outside of not only their companies but their industries and collaborates. Martin Mongiello had introduced us. He was a great guest on the show and it was nice of you to be on the show. Thank you so much. I enjoyed our conversation.
Thank you very much, Dr. Diane. It’s not a lot of time for taxation because we could speak for days. For me, it’s interesting to have some challenges. You can have some new ideas every day and develop that and I think that this is the beauty of my work.
We need more people who can understand this stuff because it’s very challenging for a lot of us. Thank you for making that easier for us. This was so much fun.
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I’d like to thank Ksenija for being my guest. We get so many great guests on the show. It’s so interesting because everybody’s got such unique perceptions and angles of all the different things that they talk about on the show. I’ve had Wolfgang Koester on in the past and we talked about blockchain. There are so many interesting people that we touched on so much of what people are interested in here. Even though I wouldn’t consider myself by any means a tax expert, I think that taxes are at the forefront of everybody’s mind with what’s going to happen, how technology is going to impact and how we track things.
Technologies For Taxation: Pay your taxes now so that when you’re old and you take your money out later, your taxes have already been paid.
That was what led to my interest in studying curiosity because no matter what topic we talk about on the show, it all comes back to curiosity for me. If we’re not asking questions, if we’re not exploring alternatives, we’re relying on the status quo way of doing things and that can lead to disastrous results. If you’re not moving forward and you’re staying still and everybody else’s moving forward, that’s problematic. That’s why I work with so many organizations to help them develop their workplaces to make sure that they embrace curiosity. To do that, you must first look at some of the things that curiosity ties into.
Think about engagement alone. We know that companies are losing more than $500 billion a year based on Gallup surveys of what we know about that. Engagement is such a huge topic because so many people are existing in their jobs when they could be thriving, growing, caring and becoming passionate about what they do. For that to happen, we’ve got to allow more exploration. We have to allow people to ask questions and to explore opportunities. We know that the majority of leaders believe that they instill curiosity or they encourage it when we find about half of employees agree with them. That’s a problem.
If we’re not working on developing curiosity, we’re going to have a lot of companies who won’t be in business and we’re going to have a lot of companies that continue to lose money due to engagement. As we’re trying to improve innovation as we’re talking about on the show, innovation is the next big thing. Everybody’s trying to come up with ways to be innovative but nobody knows the secret recipe of how to do that. What innovation is, it’s exploring new ideas, new ways of doing things. It’s about getting out of your comfort zone, cubicle, immediate company and your network.
It’s into getting into looking at how other industries have done things and not networking with people who do similar things to what you do. Some of the most interesting ideas come from outside areas. In my book, I wrote about a hospital where the leaders there had watched a Formula 1 Race Car Event. They got ideas from that industry. Who would think you’d go to a race car team to help a hospital? That’s outside of our cubicle and silo thinking that we need to embrace. That requires curiosity.
The problem I’m seeing is that so many leaders don’t recognize that there’s a need for culture change. Maybe everybody around them is agreeing or they’re not answering questions or asking questions because it’s not thought the right thing to do within the company. The humble leaders get it. They ask the hard questions. They show that they’re vulnerable, that they don’t mind looking bad if they ask a question that they don’t know the answer to show employees that they care and that they want to change the culture. What we’re trying to do with the Curiosity Code Index, which is my assessment, it’s all about recognizing what holds people back.
What holds people back, what I found was fear, assumptions or the voice in your head, technology which is the over and underutilization of it and our environment which is everybody we’ve ever come into contact with. When the companies take the Curiosity Code Index, they get this a-ha moment of, “This is what has held me back. I can look at creating this personal SWOT analysis and action plan that’s SMART goals to improve.” We’re not talking about this assessment, “Isn’t this an interesting thing to do?” We’re utilizing these results to create real and meaningful change within the corporate culture. The problem for a lot of leaders is they think that when there’s nobody questioning things, that everybody agrees that that’s a good thing.
If everybody agrees, that shows you’re in status-quo thinking. You want to learn through failures, you want to have questioned, you want to have an outside the box. I hate that term but that kind of thinking. We have to get out of our usual way of doing things. To do that, people have to feel comfortable. If leaders don’t recognize that they’re holding people back, that’s a real problem. We’re seeing a lot of CEOs who get this and I’ve worked with great companies, where the CEO of Verizon for example, sees the value of developing curiosities doing all these great videos and different things to instill this sense of questioning in their employees. I’m talking to the heads of at Novartis, they’re doing similar things where they have 100 hours of intended learning for all their employees.
It’s something that they’re sharing the value of driving curiosity within the organization that they’re getting behind it. A lot of these companies are putting their funds towards some of this education and utilizing great technology like TEDx events and different things to get people inspired to learn more and to share more. When you have employees up on the stage, for one thing, that’s another way. The best way to learned something is to teach it. People are sharing their ideas within these organizations. They’re doing these events where they’re learning from each other. It all develops a curiosity in so many ways. It’s exciting to see how much employees have taken to this. We’re getting some great results in some of the research I’m doing. Right now, I’m doing an analysis with a PhD student who’s worked for her doctoral work. He’s looking at the before and after effects of going through the Curiosity Code Index training and how it improves their ability to be curious and give great ideas to leaderships.
If everybody is trying to be innovative, this is a great measurable way to show the advantage of improving curiosity. There are plenty of books that are out there that write about the value of curiosity and what it is. There’s nothing that’s been out there until the Curiosity Code Index that can tell you what’s keeping people from being curious and give you an action plan to move forward. That’s what I found so exciting about it. I was honored that I was chosen for Thinkers50 Radar for 2020 of minds to watch of great innovative ideas. I hope you watch what we’re doing with curiosity. If you have any questions, please contact me. You can find me through my website, on LinkedIn or any of the other social media sites, @DrDianeHamilton. I would love to hear your questions. I enjoyed the conversation I had with all the guests. If you enjoy our episode, I hope you come back for the next episode of Take The Lead Radio.
Important Links:
- Ksenija Cipek
- LinkedIn – Ksenija Cipek
- Martin Mongiello – Previous episode
- Government Blockchain Association
- Wolfgang Koester – Previous episode
- LinkedIn – Dr. Diane Hamilton
- @DrDianeHamilton – Twitter
- Curiosity Code Index
About Dame of Honour Ksenija Cipek
Dame of Honour Ksenija Cipek has worked for more than 25 years for the Ministry of Finance, Tax Administration of Republic of Croatia. She is a highly respected and recognized international tax expert who has heavily involved in lawmaking and was responsible for many tax reforms in Croatia. As a Project Leader she established Compliance Risk Analysis System (CRMS) and provided idea solution for automatic VAT refund based on Risk Analysis System in Croatian Tax Administration. She is currently involved, as a Head of Tax Risk Analysis, in a future development of CRM System, connection of tax legislation and CRM System through risk analysys, especially in an analysys of solutions for applying new technologies as a Blockchain and Digital Distributed Ledger. She is Board Advisor of European Network for Economic Cooperation and Development (EUCED A.E.I.E. – E.E.I.G), Member of the Government Blockchain Association (GBA) and Lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zagreb.“
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