Solving Tax’s Biggest Compliance Barriers: Data Quality, Technology, Staff Skills & Regulatory Changes

What stands between your business and confident sales tax compliance? To find out, Vertex surveyed decision-makers from around the world who influence indirect tax in their organizations. Four barriers came up again and again: data quality, technology gaps, staff skills, and the pace of regulatory change.

Data quality: where compliance really starts

Forty-one percent of respondents called data accuracy their biggest gap. Errors in master data, tax calculations, and manual data entry all feed inaccurate returns and raise audit risk. An automated tax engine improves precision at every step, from calculation through returns filing, so you're not building compliance on a shaky foundation.

Technology gaps slow everyone down

Nearly 40% of respondents said inadequate technology was a major obstacle. Missing integrations and outdated tools create inefficiencies and increase risk. Yet 74% agreed that the right technology is critical to effective compliance. A single cloud-based tax engine that connects to your ERP, e-commerce platform, and other financial systems centralizes tax determination and removes the burden of IT maintenance from your team.

Staff skills: doing more with less

Another 39% of respondents flagged skill gaps as a key challenge. Tax expertise is harder to find, and teams are being asked to handle more complexity with fewer resources. Automated tax calculation and returns generation reduces reliance on specialized knowledge, simplifies workflows, and frees your team to focus on higher-value work. This matters even more when you're dealing with staffing shortages.

Regulatory change never slows down

With 12,000-plus jurisdictions in the U.S. alone, keeping up with changing rates, rules, exemption certificates, and return forms is a constant challenge. Respondents ranked regulatory change on par with technology and staff skills as a top barrier. A cloud-hosted solution handles tax content updates automatically, so your calculations, exemption logic, and return forms stay current without manual research.

One solution, four problems solved

Vertex offers an end-to-end, automated, cloud-based sales tax solution that addresses all four barriers together. Built-in address cleansing, exemption management, a real-time nexus dashboard, and integrations to 100-plus source financial systems work in combination to reduce compliance risk, lighten the load on your team, and help you stay ahead of regulatory change. In a complex and fast-moving tax environment, that kind of coverage is not a luxury. It's what compliance requires.