Corporate tax functions are experiencing significant operational challenges due to ever expanding regulatory requirements coupled with a tight market for experienced people and the impact of low investment in the tax function over the years. These challenges have resulted in internal control deficiencies, financial restatements, resource shortages and, in some cases, a general loss of confidence in the tax function.
As a result, CFOs and tax VPs are expressing interest in new ways to avoid many of the missteps experienced by other companies or to launch well-defined remediation programs to substantially improve the effectiveness of corporate tax operations.
Acquisitions/spins/mergers — an expanding or newly established tax function
Leadership changes in finance or tax
Foreign expansion
Sarbanes-Oxley challenges
Material weakness/significant deficiency in tax
Data quality or data access issues with ERP and subsidiary ledgers
Inability to derive legal entity books from the financial reporting systems
Inefficient or lengthy closing process
Surprises in the tax accounts that surface late in the reporting cycle
Risk management
Manual processes with multiple touches of data
Resource and competency shortages
Excessive overtime leading to high staff turnover
Poor integration among tax and the business units
Internal auditors seeking tax domain experience
Strategy calling for ongoing performance improvement in tax
Lack of or inefficient use of technology
Overly dependent on spreadsheets
Effective tax rate (ETR) materially higher than peer group
Compensation models that are not competitive
Poor integration among the overall finance function and tax (silo approach)
Frustrations in locating finalized documents and managing version and access controls
PwC's tax function effectiveness (TFE) services are designed to provide flexible, yet thorough, solutions to help improve the operational performance of the tax function that may result in lower risk and higher quality deliverables in tax accounting, compliance, controversy and tax planning. PwC's TFE network — both in the US and globally — consists of experienced tax accountants specializing in technology, process improvement, change management, project management and organization design.
Our TFE team will work with you to help increase the effectiveness (timeliness, cost, quality and control) along seven critical performance enablers — people, organization, processes, technology, strategy, data and controls — which may help you reduce risk while increasing quality in tax accounting, compliance, planning, and tax controversy.
Tax function effectiveness services may include:
Tax accounting process design and transformation
Designing tax function organization, role descriptions and reporting lines
Tax provision technology implementation and configuration
Designing technology architecture to support the enterprise wide tax function
Vendor selection for third party tax technology solutions
ERP configuration to facilitate financial reporting for tax
Designing internal controls remediation
As well as:
Creating process documentation and operations manuals
Post merger/spin tax function integration and design
