Can Tax Returns Outsourcing Actually Improve Control?

If you've ever driven on an icy road and started to slide, it helps to regain control by steering into the skid. While that guidance sounds counterintuitive, it happens to work quite well.

For many tax managers, the notion of outsourcing business functions and processes sounds a bit like sliding down a slick back road. And the last thing any tax professional wants to feel is a lack of control – of the process, the data and the decisions.

It might sound illogical, but the right outsourcing partner can actually help tax leaders improve their control – of the process, the data and the decisions. This point represents the key takeaway in a recent webcast with a Vertex Managed Services customer.

In the presentation, a veteran tax executive shares how he ultimately gained better control of sales tax returns after outsourcing the process. It turns out that internally managing returns across numerous subsidiaries was significantly more slippery – as well as more time-consuming and labor-intensive – than turning over the entire process to an outside expert. And efficient, web-accessible reporting equipped the company with sharper visibility into the tax data, returns, and filing schedules for all those subsidiaries.

Sometimes illogical ideas have the most logical outcomes.