Analyze This: Putting Performance Before the Analytics

CFOs increasingly expect their tax leaders to harness tax data to deliver forward-looking insights, yet corporate tax departments lag in leveraging data analytics to help drive business value. Tax functions need to keep pace with tax authorities that are deploying data analytics, which can help increase collections, sniff out compliance lapses and increase efficiency. But before tax functions can harness data analytics, they should be able to measure their performance and value.

Without this high-level view of what is important it is difficult for tax to establish the right objectives to achieve and convey value within the organization. These “key success factors” are the same as KPIs. When tax function KPIs are in place, they can serve as helpful guideposts for tax data analytics capabilities. As such, more tax functions of all sizes should strive to increase the strategic value they deliver to the business and recognize current KPIs.