Has your company undertaken any of the following finance initiatives on a global or regional level within the past 12 months? If yes, what was your tax department’s level of involvement in those initiatives?
Risk management and/or controls improvements
Finance function strategic review
Process improvements
Technology improvements
Shared service center implementation or review
Benchmarking review
ERP implementation or review
Integrally
involved
Somewhat
involved
Not involved at all
Source: KPMG International 2012
Values may not add to 100% due to rounding.
39%
56%
5%
36%
6%
32%
58%
11%
30%
57%
13%
30%
57%
11%
29%
56%
59%
14%
39%
53%
7%
Despite the apparent good progress in addressing standardization of tax processes and controls, there are likely to be further areas of opportunity that are not being exploited to their full extent. Among companies that report having undertaken global or regional finance transformation initiatives in the past 12 months, the tax department was “integrally involved” less than 40 percent of the time:
• 39 percent are integrally involved in risk management and/ or controls improvements and finance function strategic reviews;
• 36 percent of respondents say their tax department is integrally involved in process improvements; and
• under one-third of respondents are integrally involved in technology improvement projects, shared service center implementations or reviews, benchmarking reviews
and ERP reviews/implementations.
Given a tax department’s typical reliance on finance function processes for a good proportion of the information they need, it is essential that tax is integrated with related finance function processes. The survey results suggest that there are still significant opportunities in pushing for efficiencies in end-to-end tax processes and for tax department involvement in enhancing the value of investment made in large business-wide initiatives.
As case study #2 shows, there is now much greater understanding of how the tax department can leverage broader business developments.
Case study #2 – leveraging finance function investments
A leading international group undertook a global SAP implementation. As part of the project plan, the tax department partnered with the finance function, their tax advisers and the SAP provider to ensure that the implementation met tax compliance needs. As a result, SAP was configured to ensure that correct VAT and other indirect tax codings were properly implemented within the transactional accounting processes. Tax data was also configured to enhance compliance efficiencies when collecting and analyzing accounting data for tax return purposes.© 2013 KPMG International Cooperative (“KPMG International”), a Swiss entity. Member firms of the KPMG network of independent firms are affiliated with KPMG International. KPMG International provides no client services. All rights reserved.