Tax Function Effectiveness

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Managing your tax function effectively and sustainably in a new business landscape

Corporate tax functions experience 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. The ability of your tax function to deliver value depends on how well you adjust to the challenges that in many companies have resulted in internal control deficiencies, financial restatements, resource shortages and, in some cases, a general loss of confidence in the tax function.

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Tax Function Effectiveness (TFE) services aim to provide a flexible, comprehensive solution to meet your tax function's performance needs. We offer assistance with needs such as:

Managing disruptive change

  • Acquisitions/spins/mergers — an expanding or newly established tax function
  • Leadership changes in finance or tax
  • Foreign expansion

Internal control challenges

  • Material weakness/significant deficiency in tax
  • Data quality or data access issues with enterprise resource planning (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

Strategize for consistent 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
  • Locating finalized documents and managing version and access control

Our approach

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 Canada and globally — consists of experienced tax accountants specializing in technology, process improvement, change management, project management and organization design.

How PricewaterhouseCoopers can help

Our TFE team will work with you to help increase your tax function’s effectiveness via seven critical performance areas — people, organization, processes, technology, strategy, data and controls — which may help you reduce risk while increasing efficiency and effectiveness in your tax accounting, compliance, planning, and tax audit defence.

Our TFE team can help you improve the operational performance of your tax function with a variety of services including:

  • Designing tax function organization, role descriptions and reporting lines
  • Transforming and designing your tax accounting process
  • Creating technology architecture to support enterprise-wide tax function
  • Supporting selection of vendors for third-party tax technology solutions and helping with the implementation
  • Configuring your ERP to facilitate financial reporting for tax
  • Supporting and remediating tax internal controls
  • Creating process documentation and operations manuals
  • Benchmarking your tax function’s staff compensation
  • Developing technical competency assessments
  • Performing tax function reviews

We also have access to a global network that has successfully delivered tax function effectiveness engagements to both public and private companies in a variety of industries in more than 70 countries.

Contact a member of our team to learn more.