Why a Dutch tax-criminal case about a consultant, a CV, and a BV matters far beyond the courtroom
Dutch income attribution is the practical question behind this file. There is a familiar moment in many small businesses when the structure becomes larger than the story. The founder performs the work. One entity signs the agreement. Another sends the invoice. A recruitment agency pays into a business account. Later, money moves to the person behind the business. Everyone involved may think they understand what happened, until a tax file, a bank file, or a court file asks the simplest question of all: whose income was this?
Dutch income attribution starts with the file
I read the Advocate General’s conclusion in ECLI:NL:PHR:2026:283 in that light. It is a Dutch tax-criminal case, published by Rechtspraak, concerning a self-employed labour and process safety consultant who worked through a CV and a BV via a recruitment agency. The case covered incorrect income tax, VAT, and corporate income tax returns for 2013 to 2016. The case file records € 917,238.70 paid to the CV for 2012 to 2016 and € 142,248 paid to the BV in 2016. The fiscal disadvantage used in the case included € 325,882 for income tax, € 145,835 for VAT, and € 132,600 for corporate income tax.
Those are large numbers for a small business file. But the most important part of the conclusion is not the size of the receipts. It is the structure of the proof. Advocate General P.J. Wattel advised the Hoge Raad to quash the judgment of the Arnhem-Leeuwarden Court of Appeal and remit the case. His central criticism was that the court had not properly explained why the CV was liable for corporate income tax under the historical rules, and had not explained how the same consultancy receipts could be treated both as income of the natural person and as receipts of the CV or BV. For business owners, that is already a useful lesson in administrative honesty.
Imagine a consultant called in by an industrial client through an intermediary. The client knows the person, because the person has the expertise. The intermediary contracts with a legal entity. The invoice comes from that entity. The bank payment lands there. At the end of the month, the founder takes money out for private life. That may be entirely ordinary. But the file has to explain the route. Was the company the supplier? Was the founder paid salary? Was there a dividend? Was there a loan? Was there a current-account movement? Was VAT reported by the right party in the right period? Was corporate income tax relevant to the entity at all? If those questions are left to memory, the business has no defence against confusion. For Dutch income attribution, the contract, invoice and ledger must point to the same economic route.
The point is not that using a BV, CV, holding, stichting, or intermediary is suspicious. Many legitimate small businesses use legal forms to organise liability, ownership, finance, or cooperation. The point is that legal form does not remove the need for a readable economic story. A BV bank account is not a private wallet. At the same time, a BV cannot be used as a mist around personal extraction. Control matters, but control is not automatically the same as income. That distinction is simple in theory and often messy in practice.
The CV element makes the case sharper. Under the historical Dutch corporate income tax rules, an open commanditaire vennootschap could fall within corporate income tax. That mattered for the years in dispute. Current founders must read that historically. Since 2025, the Belastingdienst states that a CV is in principle transparent for Dutch tax purposes and no longer independently liable for corporate income tax, unless another rule applies. For VAT, however, the CV as a whole can still be the entrepreneur. One legal form can therefore sit in different positions for different tax purposes. That is exactly why the file must not collapse income tax, VAT, corporate income tax, civil liability, and criminal attribution into one vague statement of control.
There is also a wider labour-market background. CBS reports that in the first quarter of 2026 the Netherlands had 1.1 million self-employed persons without personnel, and 2.7 million employees with a flexible employment relationship. Together, flexible employees and ZZP workers made up about four in ten working people. This case is therefore not an exotic corner of the economy. It touches a large world of professionals who sell personal expertise through contracts, entities, and intermediaries.
The timing matters as well. Since 1 January 2025, the Belastingdienst again applies normal enforcement rules for labour relationships after the DBA enforcement moratorium ended. From 1 January 2026, culpability penalties can be imposed in false self-employment situations, while the Belastingdienst says default penalties are not imposed in 2026. That labour-status question is not the same as the tax-criminal attribution question in this case. But for a founder, both belong in the same discipline: the contract, the actual work pattern, the invoice, and the ledger should not contradict each other. That is why Dutch income attribution depends on records that reconcile across VAT, income tax and company accounts.
The practical habit I take from this case is modest but important. A founder should be able to pick one large revenue stream and follow it from the first project agreement to the final private benefit. Not as theatre for an adviser. Not as paperwork for its own sake. As a way to know the business. Who performed the work? Who contracted? Who invoiced? Which VAT return carried the invoice? Which account received the money? What costs belonged to the assignment? What was left as profit? How did the founder receive value? The answer can be salary, dividend, loan, repayment, expense reimbursement, or another route. But it must be a route, not an afterthought.
Good administration is often described as a legal duty. That is true, and the Belastingdienst requires entrepreneurs to keep proper records, generally for seven years. But for a small business, administration is more than retention. It is the memory of the company. It protects pricing, cash flow, reserves, lender confidence, and the founder’s own ability to explain decisions made under pressure.
A small company does not need a complicated story. It needs a coherent one. When the entity file, the bank file, the VAT file, the income-tax file, and the owner’s private withdrawals all describe the same economic route, the structure becomes understandable. When they do not, even a profitable business can look fragile. That is the quiet lesson here. The file has to tell one story before anyone else writes one for you. In the end, Dutch income attribution is readable only when the evidence tells one story.
