North America

Building a VAT Roadmap for 2021 and Beyond

Christiaan Van Der Valk
July 28, 2020

This blog was last updated on July 28, 2020

At a time when the global VAT landscape is undergoing significant change, we teamed up with Shared Services Link to understand more about the key challenges faced by AP and VAT professionals at multinational companies and what their focus is for 2021 and beyond.

What remains clear is that pace of digital change is increasing faster than ever as more countries enforce more granular and quicker response tax controls to close VAT gaps and boost economic efficiency.  Indirect tax teams can no longer work in silos: a complete compliance approach requires buy-in, cooperation and close ongoing collaboration from IT, finance and tax professionals to be truly successful.

Key insights

  • Top priority: Automating and leveraging technology for compliance
  • Top challenge: for next 5-10 years: balancing corporate and tax authorities’ digital transformations
  • 73% of respondents are worried about keeping up with the changing tax landscape
  • Increasing reliance on solution vendors for compliance of e-invoicing AP transactions

To find out more, download our infographic for the key insights and recommendations.

Having robust compliance and business transaction automation in place now will prepare you for a smoother digital transformation and help you meet the growing wave of compliance requirements being introduced by governments around the world in their mission to prevent fraud and close VAT gaps.  Here are our four top tips to help you prepare.

Four top tips for VAT compliance professionals

  1. Take a holistic approach rather than adopting local solutions. Apart from being inefficient, local point solutions will hinder global systems and your company’s digital transformation.
  2. Prepare for the inevitable shift to continuous transaction controls by automating indirect tax compliance processes now.
  3. Bring better data into your system with the right tools to reduce manual processes and avoid the operational challenges of real-time invoice rejection by tax administration platforms.
  4. Take an active approach with collaboration between tax, IT and finance teams to meet the complex requirements of an ever changing tax landscape.

Take Action

To understand more about the key challenges faced by AP and VAT professionals, download our infographic and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay ahead of regulatory news and other updates.

 

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Author

Christiaan Van Der Valk

Christiaan Van Der Valk is vice president, strategy. Elected a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow in 2000, Christiaan is an internationally recognized voice on e-business strategy, law, policy, best practice and commercial issues. Formerly co-founder and president of Trustweaver (acquired by Sovos), Christiaan also holds long-standing leadership roles at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the European E-invoicing Service Providers Association (EESPA). Over the past 20 years, he has presented at and authored key papers for international meetings at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Asia Europe Meeting, World Trade Organization and several other UN agencies. Christiaan earned his Master of Laws degree from Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.
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