Senior Consultant Indirect Tax Technology

You are an expert in your discipline and you like to take initiative where you always go the extra mile. You have an entrepreneurial nature, and you’re driven to achieve the best results at all times. You enjoy working with people: in the Netherlands, as well as internationally. And you can easily switch between different social levels, cultures and fields of expertise. The other requirements for the role of Indirect Tax Technology consultant are:

• an university degree;
• at least 3 years of relevant experience in indirect tax (either advice or compliance;
• affinity with technology;
• eager to learn;
• tax technology project experience is a plus;
• tax engine experience is a plus;
• ERP implementation experience is a plus;
• basic knowledge of SQL is a plus;
• strong analytical and communication skills;
• excellent command of written and spoken English.

You are indispensable in the projects of your team and our internationally operating clients. As a (Senior) Consultant Indirect Tax Technology, you help leading companies by improving their indirect tax cycles from generating the correct tax code to automated VAT return filing and real time reporting (first time right principle). You will work in ERP projects for implementing for instance S/4 HANA or Oracle Cloud, but also implement tax engines like OneSource, Vertex, Sovos and Avalara or others.

Tax and finance departments today often face significant resource constraints, requiring an increased focus on efficiency and effective use of technology to streamline their compliance and reporting processes. Overreliance on spreadsheets, outdated technology, and a lack of integration between tax and finance systems can hamper their ability to obtain and analyze the data needed for timely and accurate tax compliance and reporting. The combination with Finance Transformation and large scale system implementations make tax departments opt for a transition towards technology-driven tax processes.

• creating business cases for indirect tax applications and building those applications with the team;
• designing better tax processes in terms of efficiency, control and added value;
• designing IT architectures that integrate the full indirect tax cycle in ERP and Reporting systems;
• implementing indirect tax technology solutions, managing stakeholders in Tax, Finance and IT;
• working in a multidisciplinary team of consultants and IT & tax specialists.

Example of a project: Last two years we supported a variety of multinationals headquartered in the Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Norway in implementing and rolling out new tax accounting software. Pre-Covid-19 team-members travelled amongst others to the USA and Australia to execute parts of the project. We were engaged in validating the current direct tax processes and consider the best solution for the future. This is not restricted to implementing a tax accounting solution, but also integrating the ERP system towards the corporate income tax return. The projects are always different because of the diversity in stakeholders that need to be aligned (tax, finance and IT. The entire project involved a team that mixes tax, tax accounting, IT and process management expertise. And more specifically:

Last year we supported a large multinational in their transitioning to Oracle Cloud Tax. As this was a transition of the organization throughout Europe, this meant engaging with stakeholders from various countries such as Turkey and Germany. We were engaged in gathering tax relevant information on their current indirect tax processes and considering the ideal configuration of Oracle Cloud Tax based upon that. The project therefore involved a mix of VAT, Finance, IT and process management.

A project with different stages, where we firstly supported our global manufacturing and distribution client to understand the full scope of their business scenarios as they have been historically implemented in their ERP system and help connect this to the Indirect tax landscape and consequences from both tax determination and tax reporting perspective.  The second stage was to analyze the root causes for imperfections of the systems set up from an Indirect Tax perspective and advise on a roadmap to get to the ideal future design.  The third stage was to actually implement the recommended changes.  This project had a global scope, spanned over two years and included change and stakeholder management throughout the whole organization – from procurement to sales, manufacturing, distribution and finance operations, which made this both a challenging project, where not only hard skills and technology knowledge was required, but also relied heavily on social and strategical skills.

A project with a broadcasting client with a global scope where we implemented an Indirect Tax compliance tool.  First off, this project focused on understanding the practical challenges that the client faced with their reporting process and designing a high level new Indirect tax reporting process. This also included having deep understanding of their reporting requirements as well as understanding their business and the VAT consequences in that respect.  Since the projects ultimate goal was to completely handover of the day to day reporting process to the client, this meant a should to shoulder approach and spending a lot of time with the client daily.  Also part of the project was to develop and conduct user trainings and support the team after Go-Live with actually using the Indirect tax compliance tool in their newly designed reporting process.