TEI Roundtable No. 36; The Total Transformation of the Tax Function: Technology-ERP, Al, robotics, and much, much more-is Ieading the way.

• Position: Tax Executives Institute, enterprise resource planning, artificial intelligence

Clearly, the corporate tax function has been transforming dramatically in the last decade as new technology has emerged at an accelerated pace. But we've been so busy keeping up with the evolving transformation, do we know exactly how it's actually been changed? To get a handle on that thorny issue, we convened a roundtable in July that included some of the most knowledgeable practitioners in this space, including Satrajit Saha, senior manager, tax technology, in Deloitte's Dallas, Texas, office; Daren Campbell, partner at Ernst & Youngs tax technology and transformation practice and EY's Americas Tax Innovation Leader; Andrew Ruggles, partner with PwC, who works in the company's automation practice and leads its global alliance with Alteryx; and Amit Ringshia, managing director of KPMG's ignition practice. Michael Levin-Epstein, Tax Executives senior editor, moderated the discussion.

Michael Levin-Epstein: When you look back at the last couple of years, what has surprised you the most about this transformation of the tax function?

Satrajit Saha: One of the things I've noticed is just the pace of digitization, both digitization in terms of what the firms have been able to do--whether it's Deloitte or the other big firms--and the adoption that clients have towards it. If I look back at the last decade and what I've seen over the last five to seven years, there is a very rapid adoption of technologies like cloud ERP, AI, robotics, SharePoint platforms, a lot of the big data solutions by both clients [and] federal and state governments. More is needed of our tax departments with lesser resources and tighter filing deadlines. So, what has surprised me is the level of adoption of technology from our clients and the willingness to leverage their internal relationships with IT/finance and technology to accelerate solving for all of these pain areas.

Daren Campbell: What's probably surprised me the most is where some of the pressure to transform has come from. And that's in the digital tax administration. For the early part of my career, we always saw governments as kind of far behind on the technology spectrum and the adoption of technology. The last number of years, we've really seen a transition where a lot of the pressure that is on companies to transform and change is actually coming from the taxing authorities as they become much more digital. And in many cases around the world, we see that the tax administration really far outpaces the companies in their use of technology. The other thing that I think has been a bit of a surprise as well is the speed of the expansion of no-code, low-code technologies. That's a trend that has emerged, and just how rapidly that's expanded is pretty incredible. It's come at a good time, because it allows tax to solve some of the challenges that they've faced for a long time without having such a heavy dependency on IT. We hope to do a little bit more self-service around that. Those would probably be the two trends that stand out as the biggest surprises over the last several years.

Andrew Ruggles: I think there's two things. I think the emergence of the low-code, citizen-empowered approach has gained real traction across tax and finance functions over the last few years. It is one of the bigger shifts in the space. The second thing that has surprised me is our clients' biggest challenge is not necessarily the budget to invest, but it's the time and capacity to invest. That continues to be the number one barrier that surprises me in terms of companies making the leap and making the commitment to make substantive changes--the availability of time to commit to change, and either the reluctance or pressure to free up time is often a barrier that's difficult to overcome.

Amit Ringshia: While we've seen a lot of smart technology developments come to fruition--and fast--over the last few years, one thing I've learned is to not be surprised by much. Why? Because tax has...