13 Louise Vadheim Guldberg Director General Lise Puggaard Senior Consultant On 1 January 2017, the Ombudsman’s Taxation Division opened. The Taxation Division is – as one of several initiatives by Parliament – aimed at strengthening citizens’ legal protection and increasing the confidence in the tax system. ‘Legal protection’ and ‘trust’ are big and significant concepts, and how does the Ombudsman institution support these big aims in the best possible way? This is one of the important questions which the Taxation Division has worked on in 2017. The Taxation Division is a division in line with all others at the Ombudsman institution and basically functions in accordance with the same principles. This means, among other things, that the fundamental task is to assist individual citizens who have been caught in the system. This can, however, be done in many ways, and when the Taxation Division was established, it was a high priority to ensure that it would actually be possible for the Division to open cases on its own initiative, including general investigations of the tax authorities. In our opinion, this is essential because we believe that the key to making a difference in the tax sector is to a great extent to go after systemic errors – i.e. errors which do not occur only in individual cases but reflect a more systematic or general shortcoming in the case processing, and thus a shortcoming which is of importance in a number of cases or within an entire case field. For example, that an authority within a specific field is making use of standard texts which do not meet the provisions laid down in the Public Administration Act in regard to explanatory statements or that the authority is not aware that it has made a decision with secondary rights for the citizens. And we believe that the best way to uncover systemic errors is to conduct general investigations.