Tax Reporting & Strategy...

Changes to tax laws, new accounting standards and increased scrutiny of how much tax organisations are paying, means that it is more important than ever that your organisation is confident the tax numbers disclosed in your financial statements are accurate.

Early intervention into areas of complex tax accounting can help reduce last minute financial statement adjustments and discussion time with your auditor.

Although data is not a new issue for tax and accounting it’s fast turning into one of the major enablers for future state Tax and Accounting functions. Tforax authorities continue to move ever closer to real time data extraction and e-auditing with new legal requirements coming thick and fast. There has never been a greater need for tax departments to be data literate.

Tax and accounting functions can be timid in their demands of data and many are experiencing an increasing workload as a disproportionate amount of time is being spent on improving base data, rather than value add activities.

Couple that with an increasing need to drive efficiency and cost reduction and it’s no wonder data has found its way onto the list of the top five priorities of the largest organizations.

In a scenario of constant change, in which organizations need to be agile, flexible and capable of timely decision-making, it becomes important to create conditions that allow them to focus on the business. In this sense, the human resources solutions that we offer allow the client to outsource support functions that includes payroll processing for national and expatriates employees, preparation and filing of HR compliance reports, employee internet portal. These are some the services that we can offer to help the clients be more efficient on business management.

Tax authorities and other stakeholders expect tax and accounting functions to be able to demonstrate, with evidence, that they have operated in an effective and efficient way. They must be able to show, often via a formalised tax control framework and testing programme, that tax risk is mitigated to an acceptable level and tax opportunities have been taken in line with the organisation’s overall attitude to reputational and compliance risk.

Increasingly managing tax is not a purely technical challenge and the skills required also include technology awareness, project management, leadership, and communication with the wider business in a way that they understand.

Finance transformations represent risk and opportunities for tax functions. Generally there are two types: organisational change and finance system change.

Either of these generic change programmes will impact on the tax function’s ability to continue to remain tax compliant, as inevitably the data, systems and processes which tax rely on to deliver tax compliance and reporting will be impacted.

Technology is driving and enabling change throughout business. Whether through the improvement of data quality or the automation of processes, technology is at the forefront of transforming the tax and accounting function into an efficient business enabler.

The modern tax and accounting function will have a defined technology strategy which will be aligned with related parts of the business. The tax and accounting function can then integrate technology into their overall strategy with a clear roadmap for delivery either by implementing new technology or leveraging existing technology.

Tax and accounting functions are challenged – as data volume grows and organizations become more complex in both operational scope and geography, tax and accounting functions are challenged to conduct meaningful analysis in spreadsheets.

These processes are now too slow and cannot keep up with the pace of change and increase in data. It’s time to bring in real-time analytics to develop scenarios, trends and other analysis to support the tax and accounting function.