Tax managed services - supporting a global manufacturer

The client I'm working with, it is a Japanese-owned manufacturing business, has operations globally with a UK operational hub, and operations all over Europe.

Because of the growing complexity of European tax compliance, but also because tax authorities are becoming more and more digital, they were struggling to really keep on top of their compliance obligations, and they didn't feel that they had sufficient internal technology to deliver on it.

The second aspect of the challenge that this group was facing was that they were finding it quite difficult to locate and retain tax professionals of an appropriate calibre. We are, on a Pan European basis, working with this particular client, under an umbrella of tax managed services. The whole ethos of tax and execution managed services is one of partnering. The extent to which we operationalise tax is taken to the next level.

What we've tried to do is, make this very much like a different sort of contract, a different sort of relationship, where the way we've structured this account is effectively to be the tax department of the client.

For me, it's been a really interesting experience to take core tax technical advice, and then have a responsibility to ensure that gets embedded within the business, and really making sure rather than it just being advice, it becomes real for the clients.

And that meant doing everything, from operational tasks right through to the Head of Tax’s role. So, we were delivering a combination of compliance, operational, advisory and business offering services. Our compliance management technology has allowed us to provide a clearer picture of their Pan European tax affairs in a much more digestible format and enables that decision making process. In addition, our ability to move their compliance processes onto our in-house software that manages all of this, means that the client hasn't had to invest in lots of new technologies just to keep up with their obligation.

For the first time, they’ve had a much better handle on actually what their tax function should do, and I'm so proud of the PwC teams in the UK, and Belgium, and around Europe.

I am massively proud of the achievements of the team, in that we have been able collectively to take up the mantle of running a Pan European cross tax function in very challenging circumstances, with the contract pretty much beginning as the UK at least went into lockdown, is a source of enormous pride for me.