Christiaan Van Der Valk, Vice President for Strategy and Regulatory at Sovos, says technology will power real strategic success for companies required to follow continuous transaction controls (CTCs).
A growing number of governments and businesses around the world are adopting digital-first approaches for a multitude of processes, resulting in a need to move away from traditional paper-based invoicing and embrace real-time tax reporting. This trend has been largely led by Latin American countries such as Brazil, Chile and Mexico. Through adopting real-time reporting via electronic invoicing systems, they have been able to better understand their economies, reduce fraud, and close VAT gaps.
The shift to continuous transaction controls (CTCs) allows transaction data to be automatically streamed to governments, reducing the need for resource-intensive business systems and document audits for tax administrations. Through the use of rich, standardised data, tax authorities are able to compute a business’s tax liability. Businesses are generally not required to be heavily involved in this process.
With this requirement – combined with invoicing – businesses would be able to avoid filing periodic tax returns, relieving them of the burden of running VAT compliance teams and filing reports that bring no benefit. The practice, however, calls for a more comprehensive data management approach and proactive data reconciliation across different sources of government-controlled transaction data. For this reason, companies need access to a high-quality dataset in case they must challenge government-determined tax liability.
It can be problematic to have poor data quality in a VAT environment that relies heavily on legacy reporting. For example, there have been instances in which reports were inconsistent or didn’t correspond to accounting data in audits. Consequently, fines or penalties may be imposed. However, in the world of CTCs the consequences of data quality issues are of a very different magnitude. Your financial and physical supply and demand chains can practically grind to a standstill if your data isn’t approved by the tax administration – especially in nations where the tax administration ‘clears’ the invoice in real-time such as in Italy, Mexico and Brazil.
Many businesses with responsibilities in VAT jurisdictions are missing something important here. Beginning to utilise automation and other more specialised tools for producing VAT returns is a critical step toward harnessing the benefits from the mandated transition to CTCs as opposed to focusing on the challenges.
Manual is outdated
A lot of businesses are still using manual processes like spreadsheets to manage their VAT compliance, which essentially involves the time-consuming production and submission of VAT returns.
Through implementing technology like automated rules in software, companies can maximise the validity of VAT data. As well as simplifying and re-risking VAT reporting activities, the effort required to design the steps to enhance data using automated rules engines means establishing structured definitions of ‘what’s wrong with your transaction data?’ These definitions can then be used to identify the cause of quality concerns in upstream business processes and address them in order to dramatically improve CTC readiness.
For many businesses, the majority of quality concerns are down to the manual and paper-based processes used in internal workflows and trading partner relationships. Therefore, automation will play a vital role in properly preparing for CTCs.
Preparing data in this manner for VAT enforcement means that a business is paving the way for a more data-driven approach to compliance in general. Companies will increasingly be required to coordinate data being submitted to tax administrations automatically from a range of business process and accounting systems, once CTCs and other VAT digitisation initiatives become operational.
Keeping up to date with the expanding scope of information that is handed over to tax administrations in these automated data transmissions is crucial, so that companies can maintain a level of control over the image of their business operations that is constructed for the tax authorities.
As well as this, a business may benefit from this insight across data encompassing the full supply chain and transactions. For instance, this information gathered could be turned into tactics to help with strategic planning.
Business leaders may reduce expenses, boost resilience, and improve controls by automating tax and business operations and adopting a data-driven approach to compliance, allowing for a more accurate and detailed understanding of granular reporting needs.
Organisations should prioritise the building of dashboards utilising modern analytics tools to prepare for this huge transition. It’s also important to have a well-organised evidence base with clean digital archives. Technology and the insight it brings will be the driving factor for real strategic success as economies recover from the pandemic.
Data flow is key
As tax authorities and governments work to reduce VAT gaps, greater visibility into corporate databases is at the top of their agenda. This is accomplished through the government’s digitisation of all tax reporting, in which data is delivered at regular intervals that correspond to the flow of transactions and the government’s data requirements.
It is imperative that transaction data, relevant primarily for VAT purposes (though not exclusively), be received in a transactional manner. Meanwhile, other types of information, like payment data or inventory movement, may be requested on a weekly or monthly basis, whereas broader accounting data might be requested more frequently.
The introduction of CTCs should not be viewed as an IT formality, but as the first step in tax administrations gaining easy, timely and effective access to source data. The digitisation of tax will enable administrations to access data on a regular basis, as well as at a granular level.
As companies transition from manual data entry into this new world of automated data exchange, they should concentrate on why this change is important rather than how it is happening. The real prize here is not getting the ‘plumbing’ to work according to government specifications; focusing on this ‘how’ question means that companies may be missing out on a potentially critical business enabler, but equally they may be inadvertently setting themselves up for much higher levels of compliance risk.
With the introduction of CTCs and various forms of detailed digital reporting, companies should be prepared to be exposed to much more stringent audits. The reason for this is that data quality or consistency issues will gradually become more transparent to tax administration teams, which will increasingly be enabled to respond to even the smallest inconsistencies that may previously have gone under the radar with surgical precision.
The higher level of visibility allows tax authorities to cross-check more company data, its trading partners and third parties’ data. These abilities will be vastly improved as more governments complement CTC requirements with mandates for SAF-T and similar electronic auditing requirements. Through thorough analysis of this growing mass of real-time and historic data, a firm’s operations can be fully understood.
Successfully adapting to CTCs means investing in the journey rather than the destination. As everything becomes more digitised, organisations must stay on top of these changes and maintain the same level of data insights as tax authorities do. There will be a growing need for this as more countries introduce CTC regimes (both France and Germany are on the horizon).
Adapting business tools to deliver better data insights is essential to facilitating tax digitisation, both to satisfy global tax authorities and to achieve a competitive advantage in the market. In short, companies should remain fully alert and prepared to ensure a smooth transition and successful outcome of CTCs, which are the logical next step on the road to business transparency.
The domino effect of CTCs
The willingness of autonomous governments to accept digital tax reporting will determine how widespread its implementation becomes. Following more than a decade of success with these methods in Latin America, governments all over Europe, for example, have made major moves toward introducing CTCs. In doing so, there is a great deal of preparation that international companies need to do which can take a considerable amount of time and resources.
In all jurisdictions with indirect tax systems, moving toward increasingly digitised tax controls is the only path. With real-time data, governments can better understand and analyse their country’s economic health, while also enhancing fiscal controls and reducing fraud. It’s just a matter of time until these digital programmes become standard practice on a global level, as countries all across the world begin to recognise their success in reducing fraud, increasing efficiency and closing VAT gaps.
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