Dissecting the Tax-Technology Dynamic: Actionable Insights for Tax Leaders

If you’re looking for a concise yet comprehensive overview of the current tax-technology dynamic, I don’t think you can do much better than an article in IBFD’s Bulletin for International Taxation titled Technology-Enabled Tax Compliance (article is behind a paywall). The authors are Bianca Kuijper, director of direct tax & transfer pricing propositions for Thomson Reuters; Todd Cameron, product owner here at Vertex; and Zsolt Szatmari, managing senior VAT with IBFD.

The authors’ aim is to describe “many of the technologies that enable both direct and indirect tax compliance, the recent landmark regulatory events that drive them, and the considerations that tax professionals should take into account before they adopt them.” But that summary hardly does justice to the depth of useful information packed into the piece. The discussion of direct tax, for example, includes a look at the key elements of a best-in-class tax platform – from chart of accounts, to trial balance automation, to analytics and planning, and everything in between. There’s also a chart that describes a continuum of tax function effectiveness, from reactive to best in class – you might be interested to see where your tax organization fits in.

The discussion of indirect tax is just as informative, with a glance at the Wayfair context in the U.S., new VAT rules in the EU, and global trends toward the taxation of e-commerce. There’s a section on the advantages of automating indirect tax compliance. There’s also an instructive discussion of blockchain and its VAT use cases, such as real-time payments and fraud mitigation.

This is a must-read for tax leaders who want to make informed technology investment decisions. The article delivers a mountaintop view of the tax landscape and the platforms that “put tax professionals in the best possible position to deal with the dual challenges of ever-changing tax regulations and uncertain externalities.”