Jennifer Parkes

Background

About Jennifer Parkes

I am a person who loves learning. My current career break has enabled me to devote time to passions old and new, including singing in a soul choir, dancing, travelling, practicing my French, studying for a teaching English as a foreign language qualification, better understanding neurodiversity and undertaking some voluntary work. I have spent most of my working life so far focussing on company taxation. I spent 14 years at Ashtead Group plc, where I was initially employed as the Group Tax Manager and progressed to be the Group Head Of Tax and Pensions. I was responsible for tax compliance, reporting and advisory across all taxes, in multiple jurisdictions. I built up and led a team of talented tax professionals based in three different locations and found challenging and developing that team to be the most rewarding part of the role. My aim as an in house tax professional was to understand the business and its stakeholders, on both a big picture and transactional level, to enable me to align tax regulations with business processes, goals and culture. The pensions side of my role involved helping to govern both a defined contribution and defined benefit pension scheme, including contributing to investment strategies, member communications and compliance requirements. I was involved in various projects over the years including GMP reconciliation and equalisation, full buy in of the defined benefit pension plan and a change in defined contribution pension provider. My tax career started at KPMG LLP, where I became a chartered accountant and chartered tax adviser, whilst gaining valuable experience in corporate tax compliance, reporting and advisory. I put myself forward for secondments to Shell plc, where I assisted with SOX 404 processes, St Ives plc, as interim group tax manager and spent six months working in Bangalore, helping to ramp up outsourcing activities there. I believe that one of the most crucial skills for a tax professional, especially a head of tax, is to be able to communicate effectively. Specifically, being able to understand complex tax concepts and convey them in a straight forward and engaging way, in a level of detail and style suitable to the particular audience is a rare skill and something that I always strived to achieve myself and coached my team to do the same. I also have experience in various customer-facing roles, working in a restaurant, health club, shoe shop and veterinary surgery, which gave me a great introduction to how rewarding it can be to work hard as part of a great team.