Inside global tax functions

Summary report: 2023 KPMG Global Tax Function Benchmarking Survey

Managing today and transforming for tomorrow

Seasoned tax leaders make key decisions every day to evolve their tax function and keep pace with unprecedented pressures, disruptive technological advancements, heightened compliance obligations and more — all while seeking to demonstrate value within the organization and beyond.

For tax executives of multinational organizations, benchmarking against comparable tax functions can be a powerful tool for reflecting on your organization's current position and planning how to prepare for the future. To help, KPMG International conducts an ongoing survey of the tax functions in multinational organizations around the world. The data gained offers insights into tax functions globally and how they are evolving in their structure, governance, priorities and performance measures, through the use of technology and more.

What do the latest results tell us? Find out below.

About the survey

KPMG International’s Global Tax Function Benchmarking Survey charts the evolution of leading tax functions and identifies operational benchmarks for high-performing tax teams.

The selected findings in this summary report are based on a survey of almost 200 leaders in charge of tax policy and operations of companies in all major sectors, with participants from 22 jurisdictions worldwide.

Over 65 percent of respondent organizations have more than US$5 billion in annual revenue or turnover. About 90 percent have global tax functions serving operations in multiple countries/jurisdictions.

Tax leaders can still participate in the survey. By doing so, you will have the opportunity to receive personalized insights into how your tax function compares across key areas. Contact tax@kpmg.com to learn more.

What do tax leaders from around the world have to say?

Structures and resources

From geopolitical turmoil and the pandemic’s long-term effects on the future of work to the challenges of technological transformation, today’s tax functions face disruption on all sides. At the same time, they’re under intense pressure internally to cut costs, improve efficiency and add more value.

See what tax leaders had to say:

International tax reform, surging M&A activity and tight markets for tax talent are the three biggest disruptors affecting tax functions today.
Most tax functions still fall within the finance function, although a significant proportion are independent. Only 2 percent of heads of tax report to the CEO directly.
Most companies have moved to centralize their tax operations to some extent, and the majority has moved to hybrid structures that combine types of tax with functional alignment, rather than organizing along taxspecific or functional lines.
A majority of tax functions use SSC and tax service providers to perform some of tax compliance and other activities.
In addition to home and non-home country compliance (direct and indirect), the processes most commonly delegated are:
- For SSCs: escheat/unclaimed property, trade and customs, and property taxes.
- For tax service providers: expatriate tax matters, property taxes and escheat/unclaimed property.

Process, performance and metrics

As tax functions continue to evolve, transformation projects are redesigning their processes to bring greater efficiency through centralization, standardization and automation. These projects are also promoting more attention to oversight and measurement of the transformed function’s performance.

See what tax leaders have to say:

Survey results confirm a long-term trend that has seen tax functions’ priorities shift from reactive compliance to proactive value creation.
More respondents said their tax function’s primary strategy is most closely aligned with value creation than those who said their strategies are aligned with risk reduction or cost minimization.
To measure the performance of their tax function, management of respondent companies gave the most importance to how well the tax team manages tax risk, supports corporate strategy and meets tax compliance deadlines.
Annual bonuses are the most popular rewards awarded to high performing tax talent, while remote work and telecommuting has rapidly become one of the top three performance-related benefits.
The focus of standardization and centralization seems to be helping to improve the quality of the tax function’s work, but tax talent shortages may be putting this quality at risk.

Tax functions of the future

An efficient and effective tax function is structured to ensure that accountabilities are clear, the right mix of dedicated and shared resources are available, and standardized processes and technologies are leveraged to improve consistency, quality and efficiency.

See what tax leaders had to say:

In the next 5 years, most companies expect to increase their number of FTEs, as well as their use of co-source resources from shared service centers, global business services or centers of excellence.
With employee turnover among the top three disruptors facing respondent organizations, many of them are stepping up their efforts to attract and retain tax talent.
Upgrading the tax function’s skillsets is also on the agenda for many of the respondents, with strategic thinking the most-sought skill by far, followed by tax technical skills and team management.
Chief Tax Officers are starting to see the benefits of completed tax transformation projects, including shorter cycle times, improved data management and analytics, and reduced tax costs.
Future priorities for improvement include more process standardization, making better use of tax data in the business planning process, and enhancing communication and collaboration within the tax team and with other functions.
Despite the emphasis on technology and transformation, only one-quarter of respondent tax functions have dedicated tax personnel exclusively to tax technology matters or tax process improvement.

Special focus reports

To accompany the 2023 Global Tax Department Benchmarking Report, we zero in on the data through special reports taking on the lens of technology and data, ESG and private companies.

Explore below.

Sector reports

In addition, we dive into six sectors to provide at-a-glance highlights into each sector's structure and resourcing, performance measurement and metrics, use of technology and data, and initiatives supporting ESG.