Catherine McIsaac: The tax compliance and reporting landscape is getting ever more complex. I heard recently that businesses are spending up to £15 billion a year just to comply with their obligations here. I'd be really interested in hearing from you, David, on how your clients and businesses that you speak to regularly are dealing with some of this complexity and challenge.
David Lindsay: Thanks, Cat. I mean, in my view, many organisations are really at an inflection point here when it comes to thinking about how they manage their tax compliance obligations. With advances in areas such as AI and technology, we know the tax compliance landscape is going to change, and some of the challenges that organisations are facing are areas such as data management. How do you effectively manage all of your tax compliance data, particularly around really data-heavy processes? How do you manage areas like cost? How do you make sure that you're not paying any more for compliance than you absolutely need to do? And how do you manage the human resources element of this? And how do you make sure that your staff’s time are really focussed on things that really matter to them, and they're not necessarily spending too much time on areas that could otherwise be outsourced.
Catherine McIsaac: And Chris, coming to you from a reporting perspective. Given increasing levels of auditor and regulator scrutiny, do you agree with what David’s saying? Do you have any extra colour to add there?
Chris Atkinson: Absolutely. I think everything David said in terms of this crunch on resource and managing data completely shows up in your tax reporting process. If you imagine you may have a longer time to be able to deliver tax compliance. In the case of reporting, often you've only got a number of days between when books close to when a group reports, and so, you really need to focus on how you're going to be able to deliver quality in that time frame. Because auditors are demanding more accuracy in your workings in response to regulator scrutiny on the quality of disclosures. And so very much there is a need to rely on automation, rely on process, so you can spend more time focusing on those subject and complex areas. This time of year is really interesting because a lot of our December year-end clients have been through the pain of this year end, and so they're in that reflection point where they kind of sitting down with their auditors, with their advisors, and considering what went well, what didn't go so well. And in my experience, most of the time is dealt, when it doesn't go well, it's to do with not having this clear operating model and considering how you're using your in-house resource, whether you're centralised, decentralised, the use of advisors in terms of being able to enhance your current in-house capabilities very much gives your auditors confidence that your provisions are going to be more accurate. And so this in addition to, as you mentioned, data and how you get data is really important.
Catherine McIsaac: And finally, a question to you both. Are there any significant changes coming down the pipe that you think will impact our clients tax operating models?
David Lindsay: I mean, obviously there's a great deal of focus at the moment on AI and what the impact of that could be in terms of efficiency of things like tax returns, also quality of tax returns. So, AI is undoubtedly going to change things. I think, in terms of other sort of specific developments from a corporation tax perspective, we've got standardisation of corporation tax computations coming down the line. What I'd really recommend the organisations do here is sort of stop and think about their tax compliance holistically. And by taking the time now to think about these things. And really have a plan for the future, they should make sure that their compliance affairs are future-proofed.
Chris Atkinson: And with reporting, I think as I've sort of explained with the kind of crunch and on time they have, AI represents a huge step change where you could massively improve efficiencies and be able to deliver within that time frame. But you have to remember also that auditors will have the same technology. They will be developing tools to automate and produce their own enhanced substantive procedures. And so, that focus on quality and accuracy in your workings is going to become even more acute, I think. And so, really, what you need to make sure that you're doing is keeping up with that step change in technology, which takes money, frankly. And so, really, what we need to think about is that end-to-end process. Examples of sort of changes in process couldn't be more apparent at the moment with BEPS Pillar Two coming in, where you've got this new compliance obligation of filing Globe information returns, where tax teams in-house are having to consider how they've got the resource to be able to deliver this, because it's unlikely that they're going to have a huge investment to be able to improve increase manpower to deliver it. And so, with that kind of procedures, they need to actually look at their end-to-end process. Consider how tax reporting, tax compliance, how they can save time, improve efficiency, and also getting data from those processes to then be able to bring into this new compliance burden that they have to produce. And so, it's that balance between technology and manpower that you really need to kind of be focusing on at the moment so you're sort of ready for the future.
Catherine McIsaac: So it sounds like there's plenty actually, that businesses can be doing to future-proof against some of these challenges that they're facing. Well, thank you so much both for your time today. It's been a great chat.
