Reply: Promote teamwork, transparency on indirect taxes

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One of the most critical elements in maintaining an effective indirect tax function is access to accurate and relevant data, and you can’t get that with any degree of consistency or efficiency if you’re working with a solution, an approach or processes that are cobbled together.

“If a company has gone through mergers and acquisitions, the scenario is even more complicated and disjointed as you try to combine the variety of systems and processes. Dealing with inadequate data means dealing with incorrect information, and that can be costly.”

Even as companies struggle to gain oversight of their indirect VAT and GST positions and the myriad tax-relevant sources that define them, reaching across the aisle or out of the silo in an effort to refine the data is almost counterintuitive.

“Tax professionals often don’t speak the same language as their colleagues in IT, so one doesn’t know what the other needs and neither knows how to ask for it.” The same could be said for corporate tax professionals and their counterparts in business and finance, often working without a road map that makes the connection between the actions they take in their respective functional areas and the downstream tax impact.