A Winning Strategy for Building a Successful Tax Compliance Team

Tax compliance is a team sport and due to other initiatives or competing priorities in your organization, you may want to consider outsourcing.  

There are sound reasons why many tax executives may consider handing off a portion, or potentially all of their indirect tax compliance. There is also a compelling need for tax functions to get their tax compliance processes and data management activities in better order before handing off those responsibilities to an outside tax compliance partner. All tax departments can gain value from the outsourcing arrangement including efficiency, lower costs and the ability to scale among other benefits. But those that already have good compliance and data management processes actually benefit more from the outsourcing engagement. One key benefit for outsourcing compliance includes the ability to reassign tax professionals to higher-value activities in the tax and finance department.  

Those responsible for tax may also want to consider compliance outsourcing when the burden of generating month-end sales and use tax filings continue to grow in size and complexity. As the burden of compliance continues to rise, and the risk of failure in complying grows due to a variety of reasons (manual processes, staff turnover, acquisitions, new ERP systems, etc.) these and other pain points have become even more challenging in a post-Covid era.

Effective sales and use tax outsourcing engagements help to mitigate these issues and can deliver significant above-the-line tax and budget savings. It also serves as a vehicle to attract other high-quality tax professionals who join because they can contribute more of their time to higher value, which means more strategic business outcomes.  

The right partner and technology can help achieve these benefits. It’s all about selecting the right outsourcing partner with the right technology, processes, practices and people. The collaboration works best when you choose a tax partner that is familiar with your business, industry and ERP system. For me, as a former tax executive at the world’s largest food and beverage company, that was Vertex, with decades of tax software experience and people who know the importance and value of tax.

At the end of the day, your outsourcing partner becomes a critical member of your team that will accurately and efficiently deliver more value to your organization.