ADP's Tax and Technology Director Talks Tax Credits, Tools, and Technologies.

• Author: Levin-Epstein, Michael
• Position: Ewa Cater

In this issues Tax Tech Corner, senior editor Michael Levin-Epstein interviews Ewa Cater, ADP's tax and technology director. For the last fourteen years, Cater has worked with tax credits and business incentives and figured out how to close the gaps between better tax tools and technologies and tax operations. She started working toward developing different tools to scale the processes and provide assistance to ADP clients and internal groups, focusing on developing industry-specific technology solutions for tax credits and incentive management.

Michael Levin-Epstein: How can technology be applied to tax credits and incentives?

Ewa Cater: First, I think it's worth highlighting that there are thousands of state and federal tax credits and incentives out there that offer significant opportunities for companies to reduce tax liability, lower effective tax rate, or reduce tax expense. Not to mention the above-the-line opportunities, which basically translate into cash. But they are complex; they require a lot of time to manage, and they require a specific expertise to identify and then also make sure that the companies are taking advantage of them. What we found is that a central and secure incentive management platform would offer structure, transparency, and collaboration, which a lot of times is lacking when we're talking about incentives. The platform would be designed specifically for tax credits and incentives so that you know the incentives that are in your portfolio and you understand the compliance obligations. In real time, you would have access to the inventory of incentives programs that your company's participating in, including the value, how much they're worth. The length and the frequency of all reporting requirements tied to these incentive agreements would be clearly laid out, along with critical filing deadlines. Also, there's a lot of information that needs to be gathered in order to evaluate these incentives. The information needs and data that is needed to generate reports to qualify for these incentives would be identified within that platform. And finally all of the stakeholders within the tax department and outside would have real-time access to the compliance calendar for the entire portfolio and receive regular updates.

Technology and Tax incentives

Levin-Epstein: Those sound like very useful features to have. Are there any other features that you want to mention that would assist taxpayers in deciding how to...