The University of Amsterdam (UvA) has appointed Dr. Blazej Kuzniacki as a new Assistant Professor in the field of Tax and Technology, with a special focus on AI and direct taxation. 

Kuzniacki will join the Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law (ACTL) and will be one of the academic leaders of the UvA’s research project Designing the tax system for a Cashless, Platform-based and Technology-driven society (CPT project). 

The incoming expert will conduct collaborative and interdisciplinary research together with Evangelos Kanoulas, Professor of Information Retrieval at the Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam. Their research will focus particularly on explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)  in tax law, understood as meaningful insights on how a particular tax related decision is made by or with support of AI automated systems. This refers to a capacity of a given AI model to provide a taxpayer an explanation of the tax decision that makes sense to him or her, even if the output is not an explanation of the mathematics behind the decision as such. 

Kuzniacki’s research efforts will contribute to addressing a key and fundamental question: how to ensure that AI tools deployed in the field of taxation are trustworthy and beneficial to all in society? Ensuring the explainability, accuracy and fairness of decisions made on the basis of AI models is central to the acceptance and future adoption of these technologies in all domains and specially in taxation. 

With his expertise and investigation, Kuzniacki will contribute to the overall goal of the CPT project, which is to provide stakeholders and policy-makers with building blocks to make tax systems more fair, efficient and difficult to circumvent. 

About Blazej Kuzniacki

Dr. Blazej Kuzniacki has a Ph.D. in Tax Law (University of Oslo, Norway) and two Master of Arts degrees in Law and European Studies (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland). Blazej is also a tax practitioner (currently: PwC) and attorney-at-law admitted to the Polish Bar, with a focus on strategic tax advice, AI and tax law, and cross-sections of international tax and investment law. He completed a full time post-doctoral research fellowship at the Singapore Management University (2017-2018) and a full time PhD research program at the Department of Public and International Law at the University of Oslo (2012-2016). He is a member of the International Fiscal Association (IFA) and a member of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL). Dr. Kuźniacki is the author of around 100 publications with national and global coverage. His doctoral thesis “Controlled Foreign Companies (CFC) and Tax Avoidance” was published by C.H. Beck and critically acclaimed in the Intertax Literature Review by Professor Brian Arnold. Blazej is also a guest lecturer at various universities worldwide. For the outcomes of his scientific work, he was awarded, among other things, the 2015 Scholarship of Foundation for Polish Science, the 2014 Honourable mention and the 2016 IFA President YIN Scientific Award, and the 2021-2023 Scholarship for Outstanding Young Scientists in Poland.

Other appointments 

Daniël Smit and 3 new assistant professors

More information

Go to the CPT project website for more information.

Contacts

• Prof. dr. Dennis Weber, Director of the ACTL and CPT project’s General Supervisor, e-mail: d.m.weber@uva.nl  

• Juan Manuel Vázquez, Academic Coordinator of the CPT project; j.m.vazquez@uva.nl