Tax technology gathers pace.........by Simon Godley

As IT innovation keeps developing, we find that computer technology becomes a more integral part of the tax process. In fact, it seems that companies are gradually adjusting to having most of the tax compliance process highly automated, with bespoke ERP systems collecting the relevant tax numbers from financial accounts, and throwing them into a tax return. For large multinationals with complex business operations, the use of tax systems can remove large chunks of man-hours from the year-end compliance work. This effect is also now feeding into the VAT / indirect tax arena, where a small number of tech-savvy VAT specialists are developing products to automate the VAT process for large business.

Whilst in the long run this could be bad news for tax accountants as their work load decreases, Talentpool is currently finding an increasing demand for tax professionals to actually switch into the area of tax technology.

The current tax technology market is broadly serviced by 2 types of organisation. There are teams in the Big 4 firms that advise multinationals on their tax technology requirements. Then we have the software houses that design, develop and market tax software products. There is now a large array of products to choose from for each area of tax, including specialist areas such as property taxes and transfer pricing. Some of the Big 4 firms have also developed their own tax software products, which they market to clients, and hence compete against the software houses.

I think it is only a matter of time before industry, particularly amongst the large top end FTSE 100 type companies, also bring in-house this tax technology know-how and expertise.