Texas Instruments and Alteryx Tackle a Tax Problem.

• Author: Edupuganty, Sandhya

This is the first installment of a new column called Tax Technology Corner. As a corporate tax professional, you know how important technology is and how it's evolving at warp speed. With new regulatory and compliance initiatives in the federal, state, and international areas, landmark tax reform legislation, and globalization of tax monitoring and enforcement, keeping up with tax technology is not a luxury--it's a necessity. Each installment of this column will pair a taxpayer with a service provider. Together, in Q&A format, they'll tell a story about how they have worked together to solve a specific tax problem, implemented a better solution, cut costs, or improved productivity. In our first installment, Sandhya Edupuganty, tax compliance and technology director at Texas Instruments, and Matt Madden, director of product marketing at Alteryx, discuss a particularly intriguing tax issue that they successfully handled together. Michael Levin-Epstein, senior editor of Tax Executive, moderated the discussion. We hope the advice in this column can help you tackle situations involving tax technology. Let us know what you think.

Sandhya Edupuganty

Matt Madden

Michael Levin-Epstein: Sandhya, could you provide a brief description of Texas Instruments?

Sandhya Edupuganty: Texas Instruments is a multinational corporation in the semiconductor industry. We have manufacturing, R&D, and sales and distribution activities in thirty-five-plus jurisdictions; this number continues to increase with the advent of additional business opportunities. Similar to other tax departments, we at TI tax are faced with shorter timelines and limited headcount while addressing the complexity that expansion of our business and increasing global changes in tax law and regulatory requirements entail.

Levin-Epstein: Matt, could you do the same for Alteryx?

Matt Madden: Alteryx is a software company that delivers an end-to-end data science and analytics platform. What we do is help companies turn their data into actionable insights, which, in turn, will improve their businesses. A lot of people know us for our ability to take data from various data sources, regardless of the type or structure, prep and blend that data, analyze it, model that data, and then publish it out to visualization environments; but we go much beyond that. We have the ability to discover and share analytic assets across your organization, and make near-real-time decisions through the use of predictive...