Improved accuracy with reduced costs around regulatory compliance
Multiple country tax filing is manually intensive and with tight deadlines;
automation is a cost effective solution for 100% compliance.
Process
The client is a global telecommunications firm with presence in over 70 countries. The client has various affiliates and subsidiaries registered in these counties of operations. One of the challenges faced by the Finance team was preparing compliance documents for year-end submissions. This included tax filings for operations in the specific country. There was pressure on the Finance team to finalize these documents at the end of every month, or year-end fillings, since the number of days for filing these are limited. This resulted in teams working extra hours, or temporary staff being called in to prepare final reports, which resulted in errors and/or delays.
Solution
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was looked at as the solution for the problem statement. The data for filing of tax reports was available in SAP, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in use by the customer, and in the sales figure. Data source was mapped with the help of the Finance team. Any formulae or specific needs was also customized. After identifying the data sources, the bot then prepared the tax reports as per specific format for submission. The same was then verified by the Finance team to ensure data accuracy. Once approved, the finalized tax filings was either completed online or sent to pre-finalized local points of contacts for submission to the authorities in the respective countries.
Challenges Addressed
Manually intensive tax preparation and filling process
The process was low on automation and required manual intervention in most stages hence growth in business was depended on hiring more resources.
Low Turnaround Time
Since filling was for multiple countries, TAT was low to ensure all regional deadlines are met.
Highly analytical in nature
Tax preparation requires high level of analytical skills for Finance team and staying updated on regional regulations was a challenge.
Prone to errors
Since the window of operations for filing of tax reports is limited, the team used to stretch or call in temp resources for filling of documents, this resulted in errors or omissions.
Outcome
- 100% accuracy achieved post automation.
- 100% on time filling resulting in better compliance.