Preparing for Legal Efforts, Part 3

Dear UENL Community Members,

It’s been a busy week as the legal team has continued conversations with the Dutch tax authority, and has worked with us to relay this information and translate this to key action steps for our community.

We are now ready to ask for your action. This will involve two key steps to continue your participation in the litigation process:

1.     Step 1- Agreement to Object and Participate in Legal Action. There is a webform now available on our website which asks you to review and confirm your participation in the litigation. This form asks for specific information about you and your situation. This information goes directly to the legal team and is NOT stored on UENL servers.

2.     Step 2 - Download, Print, and Mail Pro Forma Objection Letter. If your 30% ruling has ENDED as of January or February 2021, please follow the instructions to submit a pro forma letter of objection ASAP. If your 30% ruling has not yet ended, you can wait on this step until your salary is affected but PLEASE complete Step 1.  

To complete these action points, please visit our TAKE ACTION page.

We kindly ask you to review all information so that you are properly informed and understand the limitations and challenges in this process. If you are agree, we recommend you take action as soon as possible.

We understand you may have questions. Rather than try to manage all of these questions 1:1 over email, we have set up a community call with our legal team on Tuesday (9 March) at 20:00. This is an optional call, open to all members of the community, whereby you can ask general questions about this process. UENL Board members will moderate the session. It will be hosted on Zoom. The meeting will NOT be recorded as to protect privacy, but a summary will be provided to the community via email. Check your email for details about this call.

We hope to have sufficiently informed you.

Sincerely,

The UENL Board

Join the UENL Google Group

As UENL ramps up its efforts for legal action, we are forming a Google Group in order to better reach interested community members.

We will use this to stay updated about the UENL litigation process over the next 2-years. To ensure that all are able to view this content, this is a PUBLIC group. However, we have enacted a series of measures to maintain privacy and smart use to the extent possible. This means that all posts are moderated, member email addresses are truncated, and no personally identifiable information is shared. Posts from admins to this group will be kept minimal - specifically for litigation updates and relevant calls-to-action along the way.
Spam is explicitly forbidden, and posts that share personally identifiable information will not be approved. We thank you for respecting these community guidelines.

Interested to join the group? Please follow these steps

1. send an email to uenlcommunity+subscribe@unitedexpats.nl.

2. reply to email to confirm (don’t use link in email, it doesn’t always work)

3. wait for administrative approval (once per week)

The Time Has Come

It has been a long time since updated this website. Many things needed to happen before we could find our footing and decide how to proceed. Our board shifted, with our founder moving back to the United States and other members needing to refocus on lives and families. We had to spent countless hours talking with lawyers - understanding our rights, what was possible, and what was simply a dream. We had to run numerous surveys with our community to identify if there was energy left to fight, if there was belief in the cause, and if we could really afford another round.

But … our community has told us clearly they are ready to for another round, they are ready to contribute, and they are ready to share their voice again.

So we did the homework, vetted potential legal teams, solicited expressions of interest, and put it the community. And, now, we have our answer. The UENL community has voted to hire Taxperience to serve as its legal representation as we challenge the legality of the #30Rule.

About the Legal Strategy

Dutch tax law contains specific provisions for ‘class actions’. Under these provisions a large population of taxpayers can benefit from the outcome of one (or several) court cases. Taxperience suggests a shortened litigation strategy (including opinion from Supreme Court) that will rely on several selected cases in line with class action.

Taxperience’s strategy removes the process of appealing to the higher tax court and, instead, negotiates in such a way that advice from the Supreme Court is used to inform the lower tax court. All parties must accept this process and decision. To be clear, when the Lower tax court is asked to involve the Dutch Supreme court from the start, the former (Lower tax court) is not obliged to do so. This effectively means that the cooperation of the tax authorities and the Lower tax court are needed in order for this process to work. Taxexperience has significant experience in such negotiations, but of course, there is no guarantee.

The estimated costs are between 100-125K (incl VAT and office fees). We are now in the process of soliciting contributions from members of the community. Once we hit our monetary goal, the UENL Stichting will move forward with signing the letter of engagement so that the work can begin.

If you are interested to contribute, please review the terms detailed at the survey link below. At the end of the survey, you will find our ING Bank account number for transfer.

Here’s to always remember that #ADealIsADeal

I WISH TO CONTRIBUTE.