Five Questions With Jeff Soar, UK Tax Firm CEO and Ex-EY Partner

Bloomberg Tax Insights & Commentary is featuring a recurring questionnaire of prominent tax professionals who are willing to share their thoughts about their work and the practice of tax these days. Today we feature Jeff Soar, the CEO and founding partner of WTS UK, a private equity-backed tax advisory firm, and EY’s former UK and Ireland tax and law managing partner.

What is the biggest challenge that tax practitioners are facing in 2026?

As I see it, there are two main challenges. The first is attracting and keeping talent. Tax isn’t typically something people dream of doing; it’s not often top of mind for students or career advisers. Many people stumble into it almost by chance. Often, individuals are pushed into narrow specialisms too quickly, without fully exploring the wide range of opportunities that tax offers.

As an industry, we need to do a better job of showing what we do and why it’s an attractive career. If people enjoy problem-solving, understanding how businesses operate, and advising on important decisions, tax can be an incredibly rewarding path.

The second challenge, of course, is artificial intelligence. Tax is a perfect environment for AI because it’s rule-based, data-driven, and repetitive. AI’s impact on tax is inevitable, but we believe it poses a significant opportunity. From our perspective, AI has been central to how we have designed and built the business—not as an add-on to existing processes, but a core part of our model and approach.

We’re also keenly aware that AI and what it can offer our industry is far from fully developed, and there is unlikely to be a single finished solution that suddenly transforms the industry overnight. But building, experimenting, and iterating responsibly is crucial. The key difference will be between firms that can do that effectively versus those that wait for a perfect solution, which will likely be too late.

What’s the biggest lesson you learned in your early years of practice?

You don’t need to have all of the answers immediately, and that trying to force one too quickly can actually work against you.

Early in your career, it’s tempting to dive straight into the detail. Tax people like precision, and we like certainty. But over time, you learn that the most valuable skill is stepping back and looking at the problem as a whole. There are a small number of core concepts in tax and, if you understand those well, you can get 80% of the way to a solution fairly quickly. The real value then comes from identifying where the 20% of gray areas are and focusing your time there, rather than trying to solve everything at once.

The problems clients face are complex, and they aren’t expecting easy solutions. They want to know that you’ve thought through their situation, understand the commercial context, and are working with them to refine the solution. At the end of the day, it’s a people business. Judgment, collaboration, and communication are just as important as technical expertise.

What is one section of the tax code that you’d like to change?

Rather than any one section, I think the way we generally approach tax legislation in the UK needs to change—quite simply because there is too much of it. We’ve talked about simplifying the tax code for years but have never really seen it happen.

Take any part of the legislation enacted in the last 10 years. At its core, the policy intent will be relatively straightforward but, over time, additional legislation, guidance notes, and statutory instruments will be layered on to address specific scenarios, without addressing the necessary changes to the original code. The result is something that works but is far more complex than it needs to be, and much harder to navigate with confidence.

In reality, meaningful simplification would almost require turning off the tax code for a period of time and starting again with a blank sheet of paper. That’s incredibly difficult to do when you’re dealing with a large legacy system. But that’s exactly why simplification is so hard to achieve.

What is the most memorable case you’ve worked on?

I’ve worked across so many different aspects of tax over my career, but I have always focused on the global specialty insurance and reinsurance market with a particular interest in Lloyd’s of London. It operates in a very unusual way and, at first glance, doesn’t make a lot of sense from a tax perspective.

If you understand the 17th-century origins of the market, and trace that through to the way it still operates today, you can start to interpret UK tax legislation and get to the bottom of most questions you get asked. A few years ago, I advised on the structure of the first AI-based Lloyd’s underwriting platform. That meant taking 17th century ways of working and applying them to a very 21st century model. It was complicated and new, but ultimately very rewarding.

What was the last thing you believed beyond a reasonable doubt?

Tax is at a genuine inflection point. It’s an industry that is ready for disruption, and both AI and challenger firms entering the market are going to play a major role in driving that change.

There is clear and growing demand for something different. Clients want advice that is faster, more joined‑up and more focused on judgment and outcomes. Tax advisers want to spend less time navigating legacy processes and more time applying their experience and insight. That shift is already happening; it’s not theoretical.

The challenge is that meaningful change is difficult to deliver inside organizations with deeply embedded ways of working. That’s why newer, more challenger‑style firms are often better placed to experiment, build new models, and reset the client relationship.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

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