With Tax Day come and gone, tax professionals are reflecting on an especially challenging busy season, given tax law changes. To navigate arduous provisions and uncertainty around new regulations, tax executives are eager to adopt digitalization to limit manual processes, increase accuracy, and provide tax departments with more capacity to serve as strategic advisors. That’s why BDO surveyed 150 tax executives at companies across the country to hear their takes on tax reform between jurisdictions, the impact of digital transformation, and how tax professionals will need to adapt to changing industry standards in 2019.
Here are some of the key takeaways from BDO’s 2019 Tax Outlook Survey:
- Fifty-five % of tax executives are focusing on automating processes in 2019, while 24 % are implementing data analytics.
- However, challenges abound as 49% of tax execs identified resource issues, such as talent and technology, as a top challenge, while 29% cited automating routine processes as a top issue this year.
- The top challenges to tax transformation in 2019 cited were adapting existing technologies (29%), funding (25%), redefining roles and processes (13%), keeping up with rapid change (13%), and getting leadership’s approval (11%).
