What is the intersection of tax and compliance? Why does a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) or compliance professional need to sit down with the corporate head of tax? How does a corporate tax function fit into a best practices compliance program? It turns out there is quite a bit a compliance professional can learn from a tax professional. Moreover, there are many aspects of tax which should be considered by a CCO and compliance professional from an overall risk management perspective. Unfortunately, these questions are rarely explored in the compliance community.
To explore these issues (and remedy this lack of awareness) I recently sat down with noted tax professional Tracy Howell to explore these and other questions. We tackled these issues and others in a five-part podcast series for Innovation in Compliance. In Part 3, we consider the issue of why tax needs a ‘seat at the table’.
I first met Tracy Howell when I had a tax issue come up in a contract interpretation and someone told me to go see him about the issue. I literally went to the basement of our building and there was the corporate tax team. I introduced myself and told him about the issue. We worked on it and he gave me some ideas. As I was leaving, he also made clear that the issue could have been handled in the contract negotiation and language put directly into the contract. From that visit, I understood why tax needed a ‘seat at the table’.
Corporate income tax is a significant component of an entity’s operating expenditures with statutory tax rates within any jurisdiction between 20% to 30% of profits. Howell said, “The business cycle includes sales, cost to deliver those sales which generate a profit, and many people think “Okay, that’s the end of it.” But then you take on the additional work of corporate income tax and it’s a significant component.” This is the reason Howell believes that “tax needs to be at the table, at the front end when a business organization is trying to define what it wants to do, where it wants to do it and how it’s going to perform what it wants to do.” A corporate tax function “needs to be at the table to help with each one of those components.”
An organization needs to ask (and answer) such questions as “Where will you manufacture the products?Where do you want to sell those goods? Where is your customer base?” Howell said that with the location of the manufacturing activity and the subsequent resale to third parties to generate a profit “you can get different answers based on where you’re manufacturing and where you’re selling.” If tax is not at the table, the “thought process is pretty much focused on the manufacturing activity, the procurement of raw materials, the application of direct labor equals finished goods, and then where you sell them.” However from the tax perspective, at the point in time each of those activities occurs “you can get substantially different results if you are manufacturing and then you are trying to sell across 25 different borders, but you are importing goods from five different countries. Tax can provide an umbrella, to achieve those corporate objectives.” But a key is that tax needs to be involved at the front end as opposed to at the back end.
Howell added that tax works with a wide variety of corporate disciplines. He pointed to tax and the corporate HR function. If your organization is a multinational company, it is literally sending  people around the world, for both short and long periods of time. Each country has certain rules about having to pay income taxes for foreign employees. If you send an employee from the US to the UK to work offshore, you have a certain amount of days before you are required pay income tax on that employee. Howell said that if tax is “interacting with a HR professional on the provision of people, they can put in a management system to prevent an employee from being in country too long and triggering the change in employment status. This can be a substantial impact for 20 or 30 employees whose tax cost are not factored into the price of their products they are servicing.”
We then turned to how tax can get a seat at the compliance table. Howell said it all starts with relationships. But relationships are two-way affairs. I have long advocated that a CCO gets out of the office and goes down the hall to meet other executives. The same holds true with your tax folks. Howell said the reason this is so critical is a CCO needs to have solid relationships with functional experts inside an organization. He stated, “it sounds a little bit of a cliche … You need to create the situation where you’re a trusted business advisor.”
I asked about tax putting on training for groups such as a corporate compliance function, with such strategies as Lunch ‘N’ Learns or other types of trainings. Howell responded, “I have found that one-on-one interaction has to happen before you can just send updates, emails, training seminars. It needs to have an in-person component. In a global organization, you are not going to be able to get in front of everybody, but the relationship must start at the top down, with those functional leads. There has to be some buy-in top down in an organization around compliance and then a willingness to talk tax. The belief that tax is here to help, there has to be some buy in on that angle.”
Join us tomorrow when we consider the role of tax in Supply Chain. Check out the full podcast series Taxman: On the Intersection of Tax and Compliance on the Compliance Podcast Network. Check out Tracy Howell on LinkedIn.