Editorial Policy

1. What Insights is for

Insights exists to explain UAE tax and accounting rules plainly, as they are written. Each article sets out what a regulation actually says, who it applies to, and what it means in practice for a business operating here.

It is general information, not advice for your situation. Nothing on these pages takes account of your circumstances, and no article should be acted on as though it did. Where a decision turns on the detail, speak to us or to another qualified adviser first.

2. How an article is made

We use AI, and we would rather say so plainly than leave you to guess.

Every article begins as an automated research pass across a fixed list of official UAE sources. What that pass finds — the actual page text, not a summary of it — is handed to a large language model, which produces a first draft. That draft goes into our content system as a draft and nothing else. It is never published automatically, and the system that writes it has no ability to publish.

From there a member of the firm edits it: correcting what is wrong, cutting what is padding, adding the practical context a model cannot know, and checking every figure against the source it came from. What you read is the version that survived that process.

3. What we work from

Research is restricted to a defined list of sources. A page outside that list cannot be cited, no matter how well it ranks.

The regulatory and standards sources we rely on are:

• Federal Tax Authority (tax.gov.ae) — VAT, corporate tax, excise, and the FTA's own guides and public clarifications
• UAE Ministry of Finance (mof.gov.ae) — Cabinet and Ministerial Decisions, treaties, policy
• UAE Legislation portal (uaelegislation.gov.ae) — the official texts of Federal Decree-Laws
• UAE Government Portal (u.ae) and the Ministry of Economy (economy.gov.ae)
• Central Bank of the UAE, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation
• IFRS Foundation and the OECD, for accounting standards and international tax policy

4. Context sources, and how we mark them

For background — deadlines being reported, a change being announced, how a free zone describes its own regime — we also draw on UAE business press and the free-zone authorities themselves: Gulf News, Khaleej Times, The National, Zawya, WAM, and the DIFC, ADGM, DMCC, RAKEZ and IFZA.

These sit below the regulators in weight and are never the sole basis for a statement about what a rule requires. Where an article makes a claim about the law, the citation goes to the law or to the authority administering it.

5. Citations

Every article carries its sources at the foot of the page, linked, with the publisher named.

Those links are selected from the pages the research pass actually retrieved. They are not produced by the language model. This is deliberate and it is the single most important control here: a model asked for a URL will readily invent a plausible one, and a citation to a page that never existed is worse than no citation at all.

6. Checking the figures

When a draft is written, every figure it states — a threshold, a rate, a deadline, a penalty — is listed as its own row for checking. Ticking a row means a person has opened the source and confirmed the number against it.

Our publishing system will not let an article go live while a single row is left unticked. That is a hard block in the software, not a habit, and it cannot be skipped for a piece someone is in a hurry to publish.

7. Who signs off

Two people are involved in every article we publish, and they are never the same person. One writes and is credited as the author. A second reviews the figures and is named on the page as having checked them.

The system enforces this: an article whose reviewer is also its author cannot be published. A writer checking their own work is a self-check, and publishing it as reviewed would overstate the control that actually happened.

Reviewers are members of the firm, named on the article, and where they hold a professional qualification it is shown next to their name.

8. Review dates

Articles carry the date they were last reviewed, alongside the name of the person who reviewed it.

That date means last reviewed, not first written. UAE tax rules change, and an article revisited in March after being published in January carries the March date. Where an article has not been revisited, the date is the date it was first published and checked — which is the honest thing for it to say.

We introduced the named review line in August 2026. A small number of earlier articles were published before it existed and do not yet show one. They were checked before publication under the same process; what is missing is the record of who did it, and we are adding those names to the articles concerned. We would rather say that here than let a reader assume the line is missing for some other reason.

9. Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it standing.

Write to info@allianceca.ae with the article and what you believe is incorrect. We check it against the source. If it is wrong we fix it, and the article's review date updates to the day we did — so a correction is visible on the page rather than made quietly.