Traditionally many organisations devote valuable resources to manually checking transactional data that forms the basis of their tax compliance work papers. Tax personnel use varying methods to perform such reviews. Typically this line item analysis involves the use of heavily customised and complex excel documents, random sampling, and applying high materiality thresholds. Given the volume of work required to prepare and validate tax returns, the ability to review and gain comfort over the veracity and integrity of the underlying transactional data is often limited by time and resource capacity constraints.

• How long does the tax function spend manually reviewing general ledger and sub-systems to ensure correct tax postings?
• When did I last have the ability to interrogate large volumes of transactional data with customised and business specific tax testing?
• Have tax deductible expenses been booked to non-deductible accounts?

• Review tax sensitised accounts: Analyse expenditure previously treated as non-deductible. Identify any expenses which can be claimed for tax purposes.
• Oversight over the entire general ledger transactions: Data driven testing over the entire population of data now replaces complex excel, random sampling and materiality limits to identify incorrect tax classifications.
• Oversight of business behaviours: Uncover operational control weaknesses which may be more prevalent in certain business units or with certain projects and transactions that give rise to more errors.
• Governance: Test controls in place for tax coding and posting and demonstrate good governance in line with the ATO’s expectations.