Tax Manager Chasing Data

Tax data is hard to get. Very hard to get. Here is why 🌫️:

⏺️ The data that tax requires first of all comes from all corners of the organization: legal, finance, the business, FP&A, treasury, HR…
⏺️ It moreover comes from outside as well, think about (tax) regulatory data, or information we get from advisors.
⏺️ Secondly, the data can come in different formats: spreadsheets, PDF, email, CSV, WORD, ppt, …
⏺️ It can be numbers, text, a screenshot, a drawing of a legal structure, …
⏺️ It can be highly structured, but often rather highly unstructured.
⏺️ It can come from source systems like a consolidation tool, an ERP or a legal entity management system. But frequently the data does not live in any source system.
⏺️ And finally, the quality of the data can be highly diverse. Some structured data coming from source systems like an ERP or consolidation tool is (supposedly) of high quality. Other data might not be that important for the data owner, and therefore of lower quality, albeit for tax, it is probably crucial. Needless to mention here – tax is all about the details, so low-quality data should in general be a no-go.

The reality is that in-house tax teams waste a lot of time on gathering and cleansing data. Like a whole lotta time. I am talking about high volumes of back-and-forth of emails, chats and calls. I am talking about chasing the data owners that don’t provide you with what you requested, or not in the agreed time, or not in the agreed quality. Because for the data owner, your question is just not their priority. I am talking about collecting tons and tons of documents from emails, to put them in a SharePoint jungle. I am most and foremost also talking about manually gathering specific data points from documents or emails, to have them in a spreadsheet so that the data can be consumed.

Sounds familiar, no 😬?

Proactive tax leaders step up their game. They invest in a structured tax data repository, where across all the relevant tax domains and obligations, the crucial documents and data points can be stored. They invest in unlocking intel from this multi-disciplinary data set, just like the tax authorities do (indeed, they compare today already data from your stat accounts with your CTX return with your IDT return and local file - oh and share some if it even internationally). These tax leaders invest in next-gen ways of document classification and data capturing, leveraging the possibilities of AI. They let the data speak for itself. Those are the tax leaders who can instantly make data-driven decisions.

Is this not where we all want to be?

Reach out to me to explore possibilities or brainstorm 👉: