Cross-Border Tax Compliance Enables Global Growth

While mounting evidence confirms that COVID-19 swiftly advanced the use of e-commerce around the world, the ripple effects of that historic acceleration have received less attention. For example, more companies of all sizes are poised to expand into new markets. These global growth opportunities can be mighty lucrative, but successfully leveraging them requires understanding and addressing some major challenges. New, complex and continually changing tax and compliance requirements feature most prominently among these obstacles.

This combination of factors elevates tax teams to an even more strategic position. Their knowledge of value added tax (VAT) requirements, trademark taxes, import and export taxes and numerous other facets of the global tax landscape are crucial to their company’s global expansion strategies. Leading tax groups pair their unique knowledge with advanced practices and tax technologies to reduce error-prone manual processes, streamline tax determination and reduce tax-compliance risks.

By doing so, these tax groups remove regulatory and technological barriers to growth so that their organizations – equipped with advanced e-commerce capabilities and new customer insights – can execute expansion plans. An upcoming webcast featuring Oracle and Vertex experts examines how tax groups are providing that strategic support. Case study examples, metrics and shared learnings related to Oracle and Vertex tax solutions will be covered.

To be sure, the potential for growth in the coming years will be substantial. In the U.S. alone, consumers spent 32% more online in 2020 than they did in 2019, according to DigitalCommerce360 research. The growing use of online channels also gives more organizations of all sizes (and in most industries) the chance to emulate larger peers and competitors by entering new markets. Among the largest 250 global retailers, 64.8% have global operations (operating in an average of more than 10 foreign countries each), according to Deloitte’s Global Powers of Retailing research.

Opportunities for global growth will arrive sooner rather than later; taking advantage of them requires business leaders to understand and mitigate accompanying risks, including cross-border tax compliance challenges.