End-to-End VAT processes

Indirect taxes, in particular VAT, are among the areas of tax practice that are already particularly affected by digital change. In this context, a large number of digital challenges play a decisive role. This diversity is reflected in the numerous legal and technical VAT requirements imposed on companies by national legislators, which must be met in addition to the harmonizing rules of the EU VAT system. 

This is not least due to the nature of indirect taxation, where the large number of transactions and the associated data volumes force companies to automate and digitize the tax assessment in their ERP system - including various upstream systems - and ultimately to report these to the tax authorities as part of their tax declaration obligations.

Value added tax as a central source of federal revenue

At the same time, the tax authorities have a strong interest in monitoring the most profitable (VAT accounts for more than 30% of tax revenue) but also the most vulnerable source of revenue by using the latest technologies and thus securing the tax bases in the best possible way during tax audits. This can be seen, among other things, in the increased requirement to provide comprehensive tax big data sets or through ever more extensive real-time reporting obligations (see also ViDA).

Digital end-to-end approach for VAT

Our aim is therefore to provide the finance or tax department with the best possible end-to-end support in the implementation of its digital strategy across the entire VAT process, i.e. with the involvement of all departments involved. 

Our focus here is on all core business processes and their VAT implications as well as the fulfillment of all VAT compliance obligations. This includes correct tax determination, the assessment of legitimate input tax deductions, the consolidation of VAT groups and simply ensuring the timely preparation of compliance reports for VAT returns. Our multidisciplinary team combines tax and IT expertise with many years of process know-how. We speak both languages and act as an interface and translator between the business requirements from the specialist departments and the implementation in IT.

Our service portfolio offers a wide range of holistic solutions, the projects are closely coordinated and flexibly scalable. In addition to the procedural anchoring of fully automated checks as a preventive control (including automated tax determination and electronic incoming invoice processing), this also includes the use of customized tools and technologies (such as SAP Tax Compliance, VAT Health Check or tax compliance solutions such as Comply or VAT@GTC by Lucanet) as part of detective analyses and compliance.