Do tax advisers "need" to be accountants?

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Family members are accountants and I worked for one of them previously, I'm interested in doing the Institute of Tax professional exams but my family always maintained that pure tax advisers were not "as good" as tax advisers who were also qualified accountants. Reason being that they didn't understand the underlying financials and that they look at transactions in isolation.

I enjoyed the tax aspect of the work but am not interested in sitting the accountancy exams.

Immy

Straight answer no.

Tax is like every area you would tend to specialize in an area.

For someone in small practice it is good to have an understanding of both. But large practice tax would be a lot more specialized

Jim2007

Strictly speak the answer is no. But in reality for most people the answer is yes. Apart from say the big accounting practices and the HQ of multinational companies there are very few positions open for someone that is purely a tax adviser and indeed in the case of most multinationals you'll need to know a lot more than Irish tax law to make it happen.

If you have both qualifications then you have a better chance as you can do tax work when it is needed and accounting work the rest of the time.