Why are entrepreneurs expected to be accountants, tax specialists and lawyers?
I have just completed several hours of training on corporate income tax.
The more I learn about taxation, the more one question troubles me: how can we reasonably expect an entrepreneur to understand all of this?
I am not talking about unwillingness. I mean a business owner who started because they love their trade: a chef who wants to delight customers, a craftsperson who loves building, a retailer who enjoys selling or a consultant who wants to help clients.
None of them started out expecting to master Belgian tax law, accounting rules, provisions, depreciation, non-deductible expenses, tax relief, taxation rules or differences of interpretation between the tax administration and case law.
Yet they carry the responsibility.
That is probably what shocks me most today.
We have built a system in which the owner remains responsible for decisions they often lack the time, knowledge or even resources to understand fully. Of course, they may have an accountant, tax adviser or lawyer. But at the end of the process, the person who signs, bears the consequences and carries the risk is still the entrepreneur.
During this training, I explored a concept that seems obvious to specialists but, in my view, remains poorly understood by many owners: accounting profit and taxable profit are different things.
Like many entrepreneurs, I long assumed that profit was profit. Once expenses were deducted from revenue, the result would naturally be the basis for taxation. Reality is very different. Between accounting profit and taxable profit come numerous corrections, add-backs, exclusions, adjustments and interpretations that can substantially change the amount on which tax is calculated.
That discovery raises a fundamental question: how many entrepreneurs really understand the mechanism? How many know that the profit shown in their income statement is not necessarily their taxable profit? How many understand the tax consequences of a provision, depreciation charge or particular accounting entry?
I have run a business for more than twelve years. I take a real interest in figures. I train regularly. I enjoy understanding what lies behind management decisions. Even so, it took several hours-long training modules just to begin understanding some basic tax mechanisms.
How, then, can we reasonably expect a craftsperson, chef, retailer or self-employed professional to master these subjects while already spending their days running a business?
More worrying still, I discovered that the issue is not only the complexity of the rules. It is also their interpretation.
One training example concerned a company operating a wind farm. It had made a provision for the eventual dismantling of its installations, calculated using past experience, technical data and supporting documents. Several years later, the tax administration considered the provision excessive and challenged its deductibility.
The company’s case is now before the courts.
What troubles me is not only the resulting legal dispute. It is that a business trying to apply the law in good faith, supported by specialists and acting carefully with documentation, can still face a reassessment because the administration considers its interpretation incorrect.
How can you build a business confidently in those conditions? How can you anticipate risk when the rules themselves are open to interpretation? How can you make provisions correctly if, years later, a different reading of the same text can challenge decisions already made?
But what affected me most in my own journey was not theory. It was what I experienced.
During a particularly difficult period for the business, I monitored our figures closely. I regularly requested interim accounts, analysed results, attended meetings and had already spent months working to turn the activity around.
The accounts in front of me showed a profit of around €200,000.
Like any owner, I made decisions using the information available. I invested, committed to certain expenses and tried to manage the business as well as I could.
When I requested finalised accounts, I expected a few adjustments—at most a few thousand euros.
The reality was entirely different.
Several essential items had not been properly included. Months of payroll were missing. Some expenses had not been recorded. Several adjustments were still outstanding.
The profit I thought I was seeing gradually turned into a loss.
My first reaction was anger.
I was doing exactly what a business owner is expected to do: monitor the figures, ask questions, request explanations and spend time understanding the business. Yet the information underpinning my decisions was wrong.
Then came fear.
This meant more than a simple accounting error. For months, we had believed we were turning the business around while, in reality, the situation was still worsening. For six months, some actions had not been taken because the indicators suggested recovery. We were actually continuing to decline without knowing it.
A few months later, we entered judicial reorganisation proceedings.
But the hardest consequence was not financial.
I had to tell my teams. I had to explain that the figures they had seen were wrong. I had to ask them to keep believing in the business when I had just discovered that the foundations of our decisions were false.
It created doubt and mistrust. It weakened some people’s confidence in my ability to lead. I even lost a member of my management team during that period.
That was probably when I felt the greatest sense of injustice.
Once the error is discovered, everyone returns to their role. The accountant explains that it was a mistake. Contracts generally limit liability.
But the business owner remains alone.
In the evening, nothing changes for those who made the mistake. They go home. Their salary continues. Their daily life stays the same.
For the entrepreneur, everything changes.
Nights become shorter. Decisions become heavier. Anxiety comes home. Questions return, as do sacrifices. Investments are cancelled. Projects are postponed. Jobs are at risk.
Yet the owner still carries the final responsibility.
That was probably when I understood that the greatest entrepreneurial risk was not losing a customer or a market.
Sometimes the greatest risk is making decisions with information you believe is correct when it is not.
The more I reflect on this, the more I believe our system has a fundamental imbalance between responsibility and expertise.
We ask entrepreneurs to bear final responsibility for extremely complex accounting and tax decisions. Yet most lack the training, time or technical ability to analyse in depth what they are shown.
I see two possible approaches.
The first would be to accept that responsibility and its implications. If entrepreneurs must bear accounting and tax risks alone, perhaps a minimum level of training in accounting, taxation and reading financial statements should be mandatory before running a company.
But if we consider it unrealistic to ask a craftsperson, retailer, chef or self-employed professional to master years of accounting and tax studies alongside their own trade, then responsibility deserves to be reconsidered.
Entrepreneurs delegate these tasks to professionals precisely because they recognise their own lack of expertise. They trust them because our system rests on specialisation and professional ethics, rather than out of naïveté.
In those circumstances, I find it difficult to understand how data-entry mistakes, incorrect postings or negligence can have major consequences while leaving most of the risk with the owner.
When an entrepreneur trusts an accountant, they are entrusting part of their business’s financial security—not merely delegating an administrative task.
When that trust breaks down, the consequences extend far beyond a figure in the accounts. They can affect jobs, families, years of work and sometimes the business’s very existence.
That is precisely why I created JM Conseils.
I do not replace accountants, tax advisers or lawyers. I help owners avoid facing figures and explanations they do not always understand alone. My role is to translate technical language into the language of business, restore clarity where there is confusion and help self-employed professionals, craftspeople and SME owners ask the right questions before signing, approving or accepting a decision that commits their company.
A business owner does not need to know everything.
But they need enough understanding to stop being at the mercy of what they do not understand.
Perhaps, ultimately, the real question is not about tax.
The real question is whether it is reasonable to expect an entrepreneur to bear full responsibility in an area that even specialists sometimes struggle to interpret with certainty.