Series 26 - The Tax Technology Ownership Problem: Who Decides How Compliance Gets Built

IT upgrades break global tax compliance for a reason that is structural rather than technical: the people making the upgrade decisions do not know what they do not know about tax, and the governance model that should surface what they do not know has not been built. This deep dive examines the specific mechanisms by which IT upgrades break tax compliance — the field changes, the mapping resets, th...

The question of who should own tax technology architecture generates genuine disagreement in most enterprises — not because the answer is unclear in principle but because the practical implications of any clear answer challenge existing organisational structures, budget authorities, and professional identities in ways that make consensus difficult. The case for tax ownership is architectural: the...

The argument that tax should own its technology architecture is not new. Tax functions have been making this case internally for years — asking for earlier involvement in ERP projects, requesting sign-off authority over configuration changes, pushing back against IT-led upgrades that break compliance workflows. What is new is the stakes. In a periodic compliance environment, the cost of the tax fu...

There is a structural problem at the centre of enterprise tax technology that most organisations have not formally named: the function that is accountable for compliance outcomes does not control the architecture that determines whether those outcomes are achievable. The tax team is responsible for the accuracy of the VAT return, the timeliness of the CTC submission, and the defensibility of the a...