Typical day for an in-house tax manager

What does a typical day in the life of in-house tax look like? Here's the reality 🥲:

1. Checking inbox for emergencies during breakfast.
2. Arrive in the office, energised to work on my project (aka “the actual work”).
3. Incoming call from local finance, new tax audit started. 🔥
4. Back-to-back calls with the business, urgent tax support required. 🔥
5. Yes! Finally, time to work on my project. Crap, data is missing. Disappointment. Start chasing stakeholders to gather data.
6. Mail from CFO re important tax question from the board. 🔥
7. Lunch. 56 new emails. Decide to eat in front of the computer.
8. Call with entire tax team. Gave an update on my project. Delayed due to missing data.
9. Quick review of a local corporate tax return before filing. More review comments than expected, despite being prepared by the local advisor. Double the amount of review time. Frustrating.
10. Yes, again some time to continue working on my project. Manual extraction of data from returns and stat accounts into my spreadsheet. Tedious job. Boring! Big time-suck.
11. Wondering is this why I became a tax manager 😭?
12. Call from the Head of Tax. Important new case law. Potential material impact for our company. 🔥 Oh boy 😬.
13. Quick check of my inbox. Another 36 new emails. Not the expected delivery of the missing data for my project though…
14. Checking the calendar for tomorrow. Almost no time left to work on my project due to back-to-back meetings for the majority of the day. Madness. Blocking some time for next week already.
15. Incoming chat from legal. Urgent assistance is required for the negotiation of an M&A deal. 🔥
16. This is it. Tomorrow is another day. Quick pre-warning to the Head of Tax re project delay. Not amused… but I am not to blame…
17. Checking inbox. Answered the 15 newest emails. LIFO, not good. Rest will be tomorrow, during breakfast 😵‍💫.