Simplifying the complexity of tax reporting

As companies revisit their core business strategy, Tax has a critical role to play. Heightened complexity, resource constraints, cost pressures, increased reporting and transparency demands, along with new ways of working are putting pressure on businesses today and driving the need for change. As a strategic partner, Tax can help your company enhance business strategy in a tax-efficient way, proactively address change, demonstrate a commitment to earning stakeholder trust, and deliver strategic business outcomes in a transparent way. Tax can also help the business ‘see around corners’ to anticipate change and prevent tax consequences that may be costly, both financially and reputationally.

But, is your Tax function well-equipped for the job? There has never been a more challenging time to operate a Tax function and keeping up with internal and external changes can be burdensome, especially as proposed changes require continual analysis both in the US and globally. Now more than ever, Tax functions need to think and work differently to gain speed, efficiency, and strategic value. This evolution is needed to gain next-level capabilities and involves a continual weighing and balancing of priorities to achieve success – however your organization defines it.

Get started by asking yourself the following questions:

  1. How are you planning now for the right skills, capabilities, and labor mix you’ll need to enable your tax function to deliver quality results on time, every time?
  2. How are you adopting digitally-enabled solutions to help manage data, enhance process, improve quality, reduce risk, and inspire new ways of working?
  3. How are you leveraging analytics to help optimize performance, analyze trends, validate results, capture synergies, and deliver value throughout the process?

Anchor Tax with an efficient and scalable operating model

As you evaluate your approach, consider which execution model best supports your needs now and is scalable for future growth needs – recognizing that each operating model has its own design elements relating to data, process, technology, and people that need to be examined. Common operating models include:

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It is important to assess the needs of your Tax function and align with the broader organization’s quality and risk management objectives – along with current compliance obligations (related to both financial statement reporting and tax filing requirements), complexity around tax legislation and strategic business priorities.

Enhance your tax reporting lifecycle

Harnessing the power of data. 

When becoming more efficient and effective as a result of digital transformation and automation, Tax is better equipped to gather real-time, tax-sensitized data from broader internal business platforms, team across various functional areas, and educate stakeholders on the value of tax-ready data. 

A clear understanding of data requirements and data sources helps ensure completeness and accuracy as well as solve for pain-points and ‘gap’ areas. In addition, leveraging enterprise-wide initiatives (e.g., ERP enhancements) to address upstream data challenges can be a unique opportunity to affect change and lead to more sustainable efforts.

Below are examples of advancement in data acquisition and transformation efforts:

Data Acquisition: Incorporating extract, transform, load (ETL) tools to automate the data sourcing process can help enable Tax to fill the gap in existing enterprise systems and significantly enhance tax data quality and accuracy, while reducing opportunities for human error within the process. It also provides an opportunity to directly connect tax engines to major data sources for real-time analysis and results.

Data extraction technology is pushing Tax to the forefront of data acquisition and opening doors into the broader organization versus just being a downstream consumer of data. 

Data Transformation: A standard data model can help provide consistent and reliable data in real-time, while enabling efficient reporting and analyses. As a result, Tax can acquire and transform the data once for use across all areas of tax. It is a basic concept but may entail considerable process changes as well as some technology changes.

Further enhance your data processing power through small automation solutions (such as ETL tools) and expanded modeling capabilities – helping to shift tax from reactive to proactive, facilitate planning, and elevate decision-making.

What actions should you take next?

As you begin or continue on your evolution journey, consider the methods used to help ensure long-term success and sustainability of solutions. The selection of technology solutions, process design, and operating model design can have an incredible impact on your tax operations and return on investment (ROI).

Consider the following key components for success:

Align on target outcomes

and identify optimization opportunities

Review your current tax ecosystem (including people, data, technology, and process) and identify pressure points where integrating changes may alleviate manual efforts, reduce financial risk due to human error, and increase bandwidth for Tax team members to perform more high value tasks. Align with broader organizational goals and tailor key performance indicators (KPIs) to each functional area.

Consider what end goals define success for your Tax function – recognizing there may be dual goals at play (C-suite versus Tax priorities). When weighing priorities, Tax should be aligned with the broader business while also considering the sustainability and scalability of solutions.

Regulatory reporting requirements don't have to feel like a burden. 

An efficient and effective tax reporting process helps removes intrusion and disruption, and gives you time back. From extracting and standardizing data to analyzing and reporting, if done correctly should make it easier to complete your compliance without missing a beat.

Contact us

Shari Forman

Shari Forman

Private Tax Leader, PwC US

Nolan Ogden

Nolan Ogden

US Tax Chief Technology Officer, PwC US

Ann Marie Achille

Ann Marie Achille

Tax Reporting & Strategy Partner, PwC US

Caleb Gauen

Caleb Gauen

Principal, Income Tax Leader, PwC US

Sarah Gette

Sarah Gette

Partner, State and Local Tax, Insourced Solutions for Tax, PwC US

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