NEW TAXATION DIVISION GOES AFTER SYSTEMIC ERRORS 17 THE MEETING BETWEEN CITIZEN AND TAX AUTHORITY It has also been fundamental to the Taxation Division’s work to focus on the meeting between citizen and authority as such. The premise is that legal protection and trust start at this meeting. The problems which citizens and enterprises can perceive as essential in this connection include, among other things, the authorities’ use of language and terminology, lack of a general overview of the documents in a case and, as mentioned above, that authorities fail to take into account the claims made by the parties. However, such issues can be difficult subjects for a more targeted investigation if they cannot be delimited to a more closely defined case field. It does not make sense, for example, to ask the authorities to hand out a number of cases where language usage or keeping of records etc. have been an issue. Therefore, the Taxation Division decided to initiate the aforementioned investigation of 30 cases with the Danish Customs and Tax Administration and the National Tax Tribunal instead. The 30 cases were selected broadly within various case fields. It was clear from the beginning that we were not going to clarify or investigate every possible error in the 30 cases but rather to conclude and describe problems in overall terms which the authorities would benefit from focusing on in future. In other words, the Ombudsman wanted to catch systemic errors – including systemic errors which occur in the meeting between citizen and authority. As part of this work, we decided to concentrate the investigation specifically on matters that can be of importance to this meeting, and thus to a good and trustful relationship. This made good sense. First of all because of the factors which the case review uncovered and because to a great extent there seemed to be a match between the matters uncovered and the problems which had been brought to the Taxation Division’s attention by external actors, among others, and S PEC I A L TA X PAG E O N W W W.OM B U DSM A N D E N . D K A special tax page is available on the Om­ budsman’s website: www.ombudsmanden. dk/skat (in Danish only). Concluded cases of general interest and a list of pending investigations within the tax field, which the Ombudsman has opened on his own initiative, are published on the tax page. On www.ombudsmanden.dk/skat, it is pos­ sible to become a subscriber and thereby receive an e-mail when new cases within the tax field are published.