When the Algorithm Asks the Questions - Eoin Fitzgerald

What happens when a region skips straight from having no tax system at all to running some of the most advanced real time reporting in the world? Eoin Fitzgerald has spent his career answering that question from the inside, and this episode digs into why the GCC's compliance future looks nothing like anywhere else.

Eoin currently leads tax at Keeyns in the UAE, building out a function from the ground up in a market where tax as a concept did not exist eight years ago. Before that he spent time in house at Dell managing compliance across dozens of entities and countries, and before that he was in consulting at BDO. That arc, from advising clients from the outside to owning the outcome from the inside, shapes almost everything he talks about in this conversation.

Together they explore the difference between giving good tax advice and giving advice a business can actually use and scale, what it looks like to build a tax function in a region with no legacy systems or institutional habits to unwind, and why real time government reporting in the GCC is shifting the real work of tax teams from filing to explaining anomalies the algorithm flags automatically.

Eoin talks through what it was like managing thousands of filings across Europe on spreadsheets at Dell, and what changes when a government portal can question a single invoice within weeks instead of waiting years for an audit. Tune in for a conversation about what tax compliance looks like when a region builds its system from zero instead of retrofitting one that is decades old.

Eoin's Article: https://keeyns.com/news/chapter-1-the-indirect-tax-function-as-it-stands-today