Expert panel "Tax culture in Serbia and how to improve it" and student debate competition launch

Ivanka Popović was born in 1959 in Rio de Janeiro. She comes from a respectable Novi Sad family. Her grandfather was Senator Daka Popović, the first ban of the Danube Banovina, and her father was Ambassador Gavra Popović, a Yugoslav diplomat. She graduated from the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy, where she received her master's and doctoral degrees and passed all the steps to the title of full professor. She has extensive experience in management, first as a Vice Dean at her faculty, and then as a Dean from 2006 to 2012. She is engaged in research on polymer degradation and stabilization, polymerization kinetics, polymer recycling and sustainable development. She has mentored over 50 graduate, final and master's theses, eight master's and six doctoral dissertations. She is the author or co-author of more than 85 scientific papers, published in international or national journals. Ivanka won a medal of the Serbian Chemical Society for success and excellence in science. She was elected Rector of the University of Belgrade on May 29, 2018. She speaks English and German, as well as French at an intermediate level.

Graduated from the Faculty of Economy in Belgrade in 2002, and later completed master studies in International Tax Law at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law within the Wirtschafts University in Vienna. He has worked in KPMG in Serbia for 16 years, going through numerous positions from an intern to a partner. He currently manages a team of more than 80 employees in the Tax and Legal department and Accounting Services department in Belgrade and Podgorica. During his work in KPMG Igor has gained experience in company office in London, working on tax proejcts regarding mergers in the finance sector. He also worked on international assigments in Germany and Russia. His primary task is the establishing and maintaining of contacts with the clients and responsibility for the quality of provided services. For the past 12 years he has also been engaged as a lecturer within the KPMG Business School in Central and East Europe in the field of internationl taxation. Igor is a founding member of the Serbian Fiscal Association (Serbian branch of International Fiscal Association). He also an active member of AmCham, where he served two terms as the secretary-treasurer. He actively participates in the dialogue on tax issues with the business community, Tax Administration and the Government representatives. He is fluent in English and Russian. 

Mr. Nerre obtained a PhD degree from the Economics Department at the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 2004, with a dissertation titled “Tax Culture and Tax Reform” which included extensive case studies on tax reforms in Japan and Russia. He held a position with the Tax Group within the Public Finance Group of German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and had been in charge of the cooperation with the IMF in the area of public finance. He served within German Development Cooperation in Serbia for nearly ten years since 2010, as project leader for the public finance reform project and being in charge of other activities dealing with tax issues. Appointed by the German Government, from June 2015 to June 2017 he served as sector coordinator "governance" for German Development Cooperation in Serbia, including among others also legal reform, EU integration, and public administration reform. Throughout his career, he provided PFM, tax policy and tax administration reform advice to governments in e.g. Pakistan, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Serbia, Mongolia, Sudan, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda. Extensive effort has been put on implementation issues of the G8 action plan “Good Financial Governance in Africa”, focussing on strengthening African tax systems (also assisting in putting up the African Tax Administration Forum, ATAF), regional initiatives, and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Another focus of work has been on the introduction/reform of VAT in Pakistan, as well as the International Tax Compact ITC. He currently serves as a Team Leader for Strenghtening the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Mechanisms project in Moldova.

Miroslav Đinović worked as the Coordinator of the Sector for Control within the Tax Administration, from 2016 to 2018, he assumed the position of Acting Director, and he later became the Assistant Director of the Center for Large Taxpayers, which is responsible for monitoring and administering corporate income tax, value added tax, excise duties, income taxes and contributions and other withholding taxes, as well as taxes on non-life insurance premiums, for large taxpayers who have an annual turnover of more than one billion dinars.

Nikola Altiparmakov is a macroeconomist specialized in public finance. He studied at leading international universities, including the University of California, Berkeley in the United States and the University of Toronto in Canada. He graduated in mathematics and economics as the best student of his generation, while he has a master's degree in economics with a specialization in macroeconomics. He has been working in the field of public finance in Serbia since 2003. He started his career as a public debt analyst in the Treasury of Serbia, and then took over the position of macroeconomic analyst at the macro-fiscal department of the Ministry of Finance. In the period from 2005 to 2007, he worked as an economic advisor in the Tax Administration of Serbia, where he monitored the process of introducing value added tax and researched the possibilities of personal income tax reform. He spent the next two years working as a consultant on a pension reform project, exploring opportunities to establish a fiscally sustainable and socially acceptable pension system in Serbia. Since 2008, he has been working as a fiscal advisor on Serbia’s economic development project, studying the long-term sustainability of public finances in Serbia. He published a number of academic and professional papers in the field of public finance in local and international professional journals

Gordana Ilić Popov was born on August 23, 1964 in Belgrade. She completed her undergraduate, master's and doctoral studies at the Faculty of Law, University of Belgrade, where she has been working as a full professor of Tax Law since 2005. She expanded her education around the world, including Germany, the Netherlands and Japan, and her most important publications are, among others, "European Union Tax Law", "Environmental Taxes", "Corporate Income Tax Base", as well as numerous scientific papers in the field of tax law. In addition to participating in numerous international conferences and seminars, she is currently working on two projects implemented by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of Serbia, as well as in the Identity Transformation of Serbia project at the Faculty of Law in Belgrade. She is a member of numerous professional associations in the country and abroad and the holder of several prestigious awards, such as the Award of the Belgrade Chamber of Commerce for the best doctoral dissertation in 1995. She speaks English.