Christopher Hall & Jonathan Leigh Pemberton Deliver Keynotes at Vertex Exchange Europe Conference

Berwyn, PA

Vertex, Inc., a leading provider of tax technology solutions and services, recently held its annual Vertex Exchange Europe Conference at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel in Brussels, Belgium.

This premier event for European business tax technology professionals featured Christopher Hall, manager indirect taxes at Ford Motor Company, and Jonathan Leigh Pemberton of the Vienna University of Economics & Business and a consultant to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and formerly of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who both presented keynote addresses. As part of the keynote, President and CEO David DeStefano discussed the continuing challenges of new tax compliance requirements in Europe including SAF-T digitization, SII, including changes in Value Added Taxes (VAT) and how the evolution of future forces could potentially affect tax.

The theme of the conference was "Bringing Tax into Focus," and the event featured discussions around what global tax departments need in terms of advanced tax solutions in order to deal with increased pressure from governments, complex tax compliance, and digital transformation efforts.

Leigh Pemberton stressed the need for tax leaders to understand the approaches that tax authorities are employing in order to close tax gaps. “Tax administrations, backed by the G20, are implementing new ways to collect and share unprecedented amounts of tax data to improve tax compliance. Translation to tax leaders — an organization’s tax data needs to be turned into a repeatable tax compliance process at both a strategic and case level — existing ERP solutions are no longer robust enough to handle tax. Providing this level of detail is challenging for even the savviest of businesses so it will be very important to build relationships with tax administrations and use advanced tax technology to enable real-time access to transactional data.”

Hall highlighted how Ford Motor Company has embarked on a major initiative to transform critical transaction systems globally, including tax. “At Ford our goal is to deliver world-class transaction tax compliance, increase efficiency, improve tax reporting and have consistent visibility into the company’s global tax data. Tax is now being recognized as a critical business issue in organizations worldwide. In working with Vertex, Ford is working toward a vision for transaction tax data management and consistent processes across systems, business units and geographies.”

“Bringing tax into focus is about capitalizing on opportunities, using advanced tax technology and anticipating trends that will transform the industry and enable tax to meet these demands while providing greater strategic value to businesses,” added DeStefano.

About Vertex

Since 1978, Vertex, Inc., has been a leading provider of tax technology and services, enabling companies of all sizes to realize the full strategic potential of the tax function by automating and integrating tax processes, while leveraging advanced and predictive analytics of tax data. Vertex provides cloud-based and on-premise solutions that can be tailored to specific industries for every major line of tax, including income, sales and consumer use, value added and payroll. Headquartered in Pennsylvania, and with offices worldwide, Vertex is a privately held company that employs over 900 professionals and serves companies across the globe.

For more information about Vertex, explore Our Company or follow Vertex on Twitter @vertexinc.

Company Contact

Marisa Norris
Vertex, Inc.
Director, Corporate Communications
marisa.norris@vertexinc.com