Governance and accountability

We have mechanisms in place to be able to adhere to these tax principles. We acknowledge that a robust governance framework is required to maintain control over tax matters and related risks. Our tax control framework has been built and developed accordingly. In this respect, a set of key controls on tax matters have been defined, controlling certain inherent risks, which periodically have been executed and whereby oversight is kept and specific review procedures performed by the Internal Audit department.

As an important topic, also foreseen to remain important for the coming years, Group Tax has increasing attention for tax technology (data analytics and more automated compliance and reporting in particular) to further enhance its control framework.

We operate a Group Tax department to ensure that tax matters are dealt with according to the mandate given to it by the Board of Management. Part of the mandate is a roles and responsibilities matrix on the basis of which it is clear how these roles and responsibilities are allocated over the different areas within the PostNL Group. We report periodically to the Board of Management on adherence to the tax policy and underlying tax principles.