Ensuring tax compliance across 68 countries with Booking.com

Booking.com has grown from an Amsterdam-based start-up for hotel reservations in 1996 to become the largest company owned by NASDAQ-listed Booking Holdings, with over 28 million room listings worldwide, available in 43 languages. After years of rapid growth and further expansion through acquisitions, the company wanted to put in place a standardised system for completing statutory financial statements and corporate income tax returns across the 68 countries it has local support entities in.

Ensuring compliance was top of the list of requirements, but Booking.com also wanted to work with a provider that could give its central teams insight into the varying standards required in different countries. The company also wanted to put in place an easy-to-use and standardised compliance dashboard, which could be continually updated to stay compliant when local laws and regulations changed.

In 2020, PwC’s Connected Tax Compliance team started working with Booking.com to put in place a Managed Service, in which PwC staff would use the data supplied by the company’s offices worldwide to complete their statutory financial statements and corporate income tax filings each year. Approximately 21 of the 68 countries Booking.com works in, the Managed Service also includes carrying out the company’s monthly book-keeping and indirect tax filings such as sales taxes.

To streamline data collection and create a standardised audit trail, PwC’s Sightline platform for statutory financial and tax compliance is used by every Booking.com team. It is pre-populated with questions and the dashboard looks the same to users in every country. PwC’s Managed Service tries to centralise as many of the processes as possible through its regional offices, working with the leaders of Booking.com’s three regional divisions, based in Singapore, Amsterdam and Sao Paolo.

However, an important element of the Managed Service is that it connects Booking.com staff in each country with local PwC teams when they need specialised advice on compliance.

“Local eyes and ears in the countries to offer in-depth knowledge, combined with centralisation where we can, is the way we work together,” said Peter Paul Hoek, a senior director in PwC’s tax reporting and strategy practice in Amsterdam.

"Our Managed Services journey with PwC has not only enhanced compliance but also provided us with invaluable insights to identify business opportunities and proactively enhance control," shared Sofia Oversluizen, Global Tax Compliance Manager at Booking.com.

In the first year of working together, the focus was on establishing a single overview of compliance for the company, which it had never had before. Teams were used to working in their own way with different service providers, but Booking.com’s leadership team saw the benefits of a standardised approach and worked closely with PwC to make sure the necessary changes happened.

“Setting up a Managed Service is a journey together, PwC had the benefit of working with a fast growing and ambitious company working out the best way to do it,” said Stan Berings, PwC’s Connected Tax Compliance lead in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, based in Amsterdam.

Putting in place a standardised approach to compliance and working with a Managed Service partner frees up statutory reporting and tax teams to work on more value-adding tasks, he added, meaning they can be more productive and add more value to the organisation without hiring new people.

To ensure strong oversight, PwC holds regular meetings with Booking.com’s three regional compliance teams to go through any issues that need attention, and also meets with a steering committee every quarter to set out how the Managed Service has met certain KPIs and talk through updates to tax and reporting legislation. Each year, PwC gathers feedback from the Booking.com staff it works with most closely, and from all the regional teams, to identify any weak points in the relationship and how to improve them.

Looking ahead, PwC and Booking.com are working towards automating more of the data gathering process for statutory reporting and tax compliance, further streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency.

Discover how PwC's Managed Services can revolutionise your compliance tasks, including VAT, transfer pricing and Pillar 2 as well as statutory reporting. Contact us today to embark on a journey towards a more efficient and effective tax management process