Telling the C-Suite about the Tax Function of the Future

Major, and multiple, global tax policy changes are capturing the attention of C-suites and boards. As tax executives help senior colleagues and board members respond to these pivotal changes, it makes sense for them to focus on a related and similarly critical topic: what the tax function of the future will need to thrive.

That’s the premise of a new European CEO article authored by Vertex Chief Technology Officer Jen Kurtz. “A rapidly changing global tax policy environment has instilled tax planning with a growing strategic importance,” Jen notes while pointing out that most of these policy and regulatory changes require tax departments to collect more – and more detailed – data while providing an increasingly real-time view of the organization’s tax-compliance activities.

For tax functions to flourish in their increasingly important role, they will need to recruit and develop new talent, put in place new supporting technology and advance their collaboration with the information technology (IT) function.

“Many tax functions are discovering they have a growing need for tax experts with data management and data science skills – and they’re not alone,” Jen writes. “Other parts of the organization and other companies are hungry for data science talent, which intensifies competition.”

As Jen has previously described, more tax functions want to recruit and develop “tax technologists” – tax-first professionals who complement their tax policy and compliance expertise with valuable knowledge of tax technology (and how it fits with enterprise technology). By laying out this type of talent need – along with related technology and relationship management changes – tax leaders can make a clear and compelling case for why and how their functions need to transform to address an increasingly uncertain external tax environment.