Industry
Energy
Our role
Tax Managed Services
Featuring
Foundational tax services, finance function and business structure
Issue A desire for a more proactive, strategic approach
A large Canadian sustainable energy solutions company was dealing with a series of frustrations, including last-minute scrambling to address significant tax issues.
This organization wanted a responsive and proactive approach that could help them drive more business value. They reached out to PwC Canada about the possibility of having us support them with various parts of their tax function, including business advisory, internal reporting and external tax compliance.
Recognizing the company’s broader challenges and objectives, our PwC Canada team proposed a tax managed services arrangement. Our solution incorporated a combination of managed services—including built-in activities that would improve, automate and streamline their tax activities over the duration of the contract—in addition to a flexible advisory services component. This would make it easy for them to ask us for insights and advice without concern about added costs.
They appreciated that our approach was focused on helping them elevate and accelerate their tax processes over time and signed a five-year managed services agreement with our firm.
Solution Becoming a trusted tax partner
To manage this organization’s tax needs and their desire for more transparency and responsiveness, we developed a two-pronged approach focused on managed tax services and advisory services.
Managed tax services: We’re providing them with ongoing services related to their tax provision, income tax and withholding tax compliance. Given their long-term commitment to collaboration and continuous improvement, we’re also working with them over time to assess the current state of their tax processes, people, data and technology. This will identify risks and gaps in their current state so we can improve, streamline and automate their end-to-end tax processes. This will reduce the level of manual work involved and the risks associated with manual inputs and calculations.
Advisory services: We’re providing this organization with a structured tax advisory arrangement so they feel comfortable reaching out to us for advice on any number of topics without having to worry about costs or contract extensions. This approach provides them with opportunities to leverage insights from across our PwC global network and makes it easy for them to consider us a value-added extension of their team.
Impact More responsive, strategic tax function
We’ve become a critical part of this organization’s tax function, successfully navigating them through their income and tax withholding compliance and their tax provision for financial reporting. Our team’s automation capabilities have been essential, enabling us to swiftly respond to many of their requests—for example, turning around necessary changes in hours rather than days or weeks.
Our dual approach has allowed us to establish a trusted relationship, where we’re viewed less as a transactional service provider and more as a key team member—fully committed to their long-term success. This approach, supported by the structure of our tax managed services engagement, has been critical to our continued success as they’ve gone through a number of internal resource changes, including at the senior leadership level.
Increasingly, we’re working together to unlock insights on a variety of topics because they trust our knowledge, team and proactive focus on bringing the right subject matter experts to the table at the right time.
Now that this organization is confident in the foundational tax services we’re providing, we are reviewing various aspects of their finance function and business structure to help them unlock additional value they can use to fuel their growth. We’re also working with them to identify additional process improvements and opportunities to use automation to reduce their manual effort. This will help them mitigate risks, increase accuracy and free up capacity so team members can focus on more strategic business objectives.
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