E-lnvoicing Mandates, Al, and the Evolving In-House Tax Role.

• Date: 01 March 2024

Two key areas shaping the evolving roles of in-house tax professionals are e-invoicing mandates and artificial intelligence (AI). Ray Grove, head of corporate tax and trade for Thomson Reuters, knows all about these developments. Tax Executive's managing editor, Sam Hoffmeister, interviewed him in January to glean some of Grove's expert insights.

Sam Hoffmeister: We're seeing governments increasingly considering tax reforms to grow transparency around compliance with digital reporting. E-invoicing mandates are a good example. What challenges do new regulations bring for multinational businesses?

Ray Grove: You can break challenges into a few key areas. One, for a lot of organizations, there's always the challenge of understanding impact. "So, I've got a new regime requirement that's coming." Maybe you're aware of it, hopefully you're aware of it, following Tax Executive and other publications and making sure you're staying abreast of things. But understanding the impact on your organization is not always simple. The requirements are complicated, and challenges can be significant. The other aspect, once you understand the implications and the impact, is "What can I do about it? How will I meet this need?" All these needs--especially when we talk about real-time reporting going more from a look-back to a look-forward tax process, creating that transparency--also create, for lots of organizations, license-to-operate issues. Information is becoming more real-time, more detailed, and now we're getting to the heart of every transaction in every business, the invoice, and saying, "I need to see that information. I need total and complete detail." In some cases I need to be able, in a clearance model, to approve that transaction prior to two parties actually executing on it. That creates a lot of system challenges, too. You've got the overall finance and digital transformations for many organizations that have been sitting on archaic [technological] solutions in parts of their business. But you also have these compliance obligations. Those are two separate but very related challenges. When we look at the revenue generated by tax and the role that plays in society, that real-time compliance, that transparency, and that real-time tax collection become much more prominent. Over eighty countries have announced e-invoicing mandates. A lot of organizations have very disparate, regional approaches to solving the e-invoicing problem, which for tax professionals and IT professionals, and really the whole organization, creates multiple challenges. It doesn't...