In conversation with: Jos Bhasker

Transcript

Tell us about yourself, your role, and the type of work you do with clients.

Hi, I’m Jos. I’m a senior manager in our tax technology team. We’re a national team of around 60 people and we help our clients find solutions for their tax challenges, typically using a mixture of technology and business processes.

Our team has areas of expertise ranging from tax reporting technology, right through to robotic process automation and product development. I recently moved over from PwC Australia where I was working in product development and tech implementations across a range of industries and businesses with the aim of automating processes using tech. My previous experience spans our full range of capabilities, which means that I can support clients holistically, and at all stages of the tax automation journey.

Is there anything in particular that you are currently speaking to clients about?

Pillar 2 has been an issue that clients are speaking to me about. Many are at different stages in their journey of assessing whether they are affected by the model rules and if they'll need to pay top-up tax. Clients are realising that it’s crucial to have the right technology infrastructure in place to support the process, as well as harnessing the potential of data for multiple uses and tax reporting in general.

In response to this - PwC have developed Marta, a market analyser dashboarding solution to assist with the initial Pillar 2 impact assessment which has resonated really well with the market. We work with many of the major third party tax reporting software vendors including Onesource Tax Provision, Longview, Oracle TRCS and have an alliance with Workiva, which we use to deliver stat accounting automation. We also speak to clients about small automation data transformation in Alteryx or visualisations in Tableau or Power BI.

What advice would you give to organisations looking to invest in tax technology?

Implementing tax technology can seem really daunting, but it’s really just about taking the first step and tackling the low-hanging fruit as you’re not going to automate everything in one go. It might be as simple as thinking about small automation. For example, what visualisations might augment your current process, or what data manipulation are you performing repetitively and manually that could be automated using Alteryx?

So pause, create a vision and look for areas that you can make changes in easily, then iterate. It so important to have a flexible roadmap - change is inevitable so reflect periodically on the data and technology landscape. That way, you drive the type of the change that your organisation needs; it’s impossible to be future proof. Once you do this, you can start harnessing your data and gaining insight into it, do less more often with the data that you have, and improve it as you go.

As an example - one of our clients has a tax accounting software that automates 70-80% of their tax adjustments across their entities. We’ve now linked a dashboard that automatically generates reports - this saves a huge amount of time from a preparation perspective, provides insights into the data, and delivers time savings. With all of this in place - the client can spend more time reviewing key risk areas.

What should organisations looking for advice do next?

Get in touch with me directly or reach out to your PwC contact if you would like to discuss your tax technology requirements. We can help with the initial exploration phase, business case right through to implementation and continuous improvement.