2021 – The Year of the Corporate Tax Professional

IS 2020 OVER YET? No one will argue that it has been one of the craziest years yet. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more changes are emerging at a time when tax departments are having to work remotely. Keeping up with these reforms presents a major challenge to the tax chiefs of world’s largest corporations.

In a nutshell, the world of corporate tax is evolving, and technology will be the key as companies deal with the ever-more complex set of rules and regulations from governments all over the world.

Across the board, the pandemic has accelerated the impact of digital transformation upon companies, and this is driving them to reimagine the way they do business. As these changes are taking place, some back-office functions are catching-up. Speaking of back office, I do not think anyone will argue, that the greatest need for change lies within the tax departments. After all, every business decision or transaction has a tax implication.

Tax departments and those responsible for tax notices and compliance, must keep up with initiatives of increasing efficiency and accuracy, as well as providing proven value to the business, even within a remote work environment. There is an abundance of benefits in using technology for those companies and their teams handling tax and compliance notifications such as cost savings; efficiency; better, faster data analysis; clearer decision-making; the ability to streamline repetitive tasks.

These benefits enable tax staff to add value by creating the efficiencies to free up workers to focus on other areas within the company where they can contribute more strategically. But, unfortunately, technology is under-utilized. In most instances the tax team simply lacked priority with tech departments for development of technology specific to tax departments workflow needs.

Often, corporate tax department heads often find that they are competing for technology talent with other business functions and sectors unless they are prepared to develop their programs with their own specialists. These are tax experts who know technology, or technologists who understand tax issues. It takes strong leadership skills, including hard skills to set strategy, allocate budgets, and select the right technology; in addition to soft skills to communicate the strategy, inspire their teams, and manage change. The result is that that the tax departments are left using Excel spreadsheets from siloed business units or solutions built specifically for other departments such as IT, Sales and Marketing.

Fortunately, there are solutions specifically built for corporate tax professionals that allow tax departments to gain control and be better positioned to respond to notices and requests as well as handle the workload demands and manage the implications of any new legislation and resulting notices. One such solution is NoticeNinja.  NoticeNinja is a modern, intuitive, cloud-based workflow and task management solution built from the ground up exclusively for Corporate Tax Professionals. It allows for, monitoring and responding to mandatory government communications and offers automated processing, including State, City and Local compliance. It can process any government notice from any agency worldwide.

So out with the old 2020 ways of doing business and in with the new 2021 modern corporate tax professional.