After nearly four decades in tax, I’ve become more convinced — not less — that clients want perspective alongside precision: advisers who surface the real issues and work through them in a way that is practical, grounded, and usable.
Velten Advisors is deliberately small. That is not a constraint — it is the point. Each engagement is led by a senior adviser, not delegated to a team using a template.
Our work spans Singapore tax, cross-border structuring, tax transparency, governance, family office and HNWI advisory, and disputes. What connects it is our approach: we stay close to the client, and we engage with complexity rather than default to standard solutions.
Scale is not the ambition — depth is.
The backdrop is a profession that is changing quickly. Technical knowledge is more accessible and increasingly augmented by AI. At the same time, tax authorities are more data-driven, more connected, and better able to identify inconsistencies across jurisdictions.
The result is a shift in where risk sits — and how it needs to be managed.
The cost of getting tax wrong hasn’t changed.
The margin for error has.
And in many cases, it is no longer the technical answer that creates risk — it is everything around it.
Two areas of work are coming through particularly strongly.
The first is structural transparency and multi-jurisdiction alignment, particularly in the context of CRS 2.0 and CARF.
The issue is no longer whether information is reported, but whether it is reported coherently and reflects the underlying reality.
What we are seeing is less traditional non-compliance risk, and more misalignment risk — where structures, classifications, and reporting positions diverge across institutions, advisers, and jurisdictions.
Increasingly, that divergence becomes visible — whether through regulatory inquiry, execution friction, or inconsistencies across counterparties.
The work here is not transactional. It is governance-led: ensuring that structure, behaviour, and reporting form a coherent whole — one that can withstand scrutiny.
The second is the governance of AI in tax, and the changing nature of professional risk.
AI is already embedded across tax workflows. But in a profession where “mostly correct” is not sufficient, unstructured use of AI is not efficient — it is unmanaged risk.
The key shift is this: AI does not reduce professional responsibility. It concentrates it.
This changes the question.
It is no longer simply whether a position is technically correct, but whether it can be reconstructed, explained, and defended when challenged.
These two areas are converging around a single idea:
Tax positions must be coherent, explainable, and defensible in an increasingly transparent and AI-enabled environment.
And that brings us back to where this started.
Access to answers is no longer the constraint.
Understanding them — and standing behind them — is.