Ireland’s tax compliance landscape has never been more demanding or complex. Tax and financial teams are being asked to navigate a perfect storm of new global rules, accelerated reporting cycles, including real-time digital reporting obligations and ever-increasing scrutiny from tax authorities, regulators, auditors and investors. For companies with a presence in multiple jurisdictions, the taxation challenge is greater still.
This is where PwC’s connected tax compliance offering comes into play. The end-to-end, data-led and technology-enabled approach standardises and automates compliance across jurisdictions, says PwC Ireland’s connected tax compliance leader Colm Browne. This brings together people, process and technology in a single, consistent model, and shifts the focus from manual form preparation to high-quality tax data management, enhanced governance and real-time insights.
“Regulatory change is forcing companies to modernise their approach to tax compliance,” says Browne. “There is a growing need for co-ordination across tax heads and territories. At the same time, tax functions are being asked to do a lot more, but this is not necessarily being matched with increased resources. The stakes have never been higher. High quality data, strong governance and reliable technology are now essential to getting filings right first time and maintaining confidence with Revenue, regulators, auditors and investors.”
Those regulatory changes include country-by-country reporting requirements, BEPS Pillar 2, interest limitation rules, the EU DAC6 mandatory disclosure regime on certain cross-border tax arrangements, withdrawal of filing extension on Revenue requirements for financial statements to be filed in the machine and human-readable in-line extensible business reporting language (iXBRL) format, e-invoicing requirements, a steady stream of Finance Act changes, and more. These new obligations are driving a step change in the volume, complexity and granularity of data that Irish businesses must capture, validate and report.
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The pressure on the indirect tax function is even greater, according to PwC Ireland tax partner Kim Clarke. Irish and EU tax authorities are moving away from periodic retrospective filing of returns to near real-time transaction level reporting, she says.
“There are massive changes coming in the next few years,” says Clarke. “The VAT system is moving from paper and pdf invoices to electronic invoicing and e-reporting. Data relating to a company’s sales and purchases will go straight to Revenue and other EU tax authorities in near real time, increasing tax transparency. Many countries have introduced e-invoicing already and the first obligations will commence in Ireland from November 2028.”
Switching from paper to e-invoicing and near real-time digital reporting is easier said than done. “It all starts with the data,” says Clarke. “Finance and tax teams need to collect transaction-level data from different sources so that any gaps which may become future roadblocks for e-invoicing can be identified early. Companies operating cross-border often have several different enterprise resource planning systems and might also need to co-ordinate data prepared under varying rules in a number of jurisdictions.”
One standardised approach
PwC’s connected tax compliance offering lifts that burden from tax teams. Instead of having to engage multiple service providers for different tax heads or to reinvent the wheel for every territory in which they operate, the service gives Irish businesses access to one standardised approach across corporation tax; VAT; transfer pricing; research and development; tax incentives; employment tax; relevant contracts tax; statutory financial statements; iXBRL filings and more, all delivered by a single service provider.
“The traditional, manual, jurisdiction by jurisdiction approach to compliance is no longer fit for purpose,” says Clarke. “What is needed instead is a single, data-led and technology-enabled operating model that delivers consistency, control and efficiency across every tax head.”
The benefits are clear. “Not only do we improve accuracy, we lower the cost of compliance for clients,” she says. “By streamlining the end-to-end compliance life cycle, we reduce duplication, manual effort and the need for fragmented local solutions. One-time data capture and centralised preparation significantly reduce compliance spend.”
The standardised approach brings inherent benefits. Inconsistent, jurisdiction-specific processes are replaced with a single, controlled compliance framework featuring common inputs, enhanced data quality, digital audit trails and real-time oversight. This results in improved data governance, consistency across territories and a likely reduction in the risk of errors, late filings or unwelcome Revenue queries.
Better business insights
Collecting data centrally also produces gains. “By adopting PwC’s connected tax compliance offering, tax and finance functions will be able to distil the valuable data used for tax reporting purposes and deliver insights to support broader business strategy,” says Clarke. “The service also frees up people in tax functions to spend more time on value adding activities and strategic decision making.”
Best-in-class technology underpins the service, according to Browne. The PwC proprietary platform, Sightline, gives tax teams 360-degree visibility of their organisation’s entire tax landscape, he says.
“CFOs get a helicopter view of all tax heads across different territories. They can see the tax heads across different reporting requirements and see at a glance if they are up to date. This puts CFOs fully in control and vastly reduces the risk of late filings or missed reporting deadlines.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are also leveraged. “PwC has invested a lot in AI to assist with compliance work,” says Clarke. “It is being used for data extraction and compliance standardisation, for example. But the output is always reviewed by appropriate tax specialists. The human in the loop is critically important. Ultimately, it speeds up compliance work and helps to extract insights from data. This allows our experts to focus on the issues that really matter to our clients.”
Those experts are based in Ireland and across the PwC global network. “We combine centralised and streamlined data collection with deep local expertise and cross-border governance capabilities to strengthen clients’ readiness for evolving regulatory demands in every territory in which they operate,” says Browne.
The model is suitable for all sizes of company and not just those with a presence in multiple jurisdictions, Clarke explains. “It is built to be scalable. Whether a client is a large multinational group filing in dozens of jurisdictions, or a single Irish company looking to streamline its annual tax compliance cycle, the same principles apply.
“Connected tax compliance clients include FDI companies such as US multinationals, Irish PLCs and private businesses,” Browne adds. An interesting use case he points to is an Irish company expanding overseas for the first time. “They might have a small finance team here in Ireland which doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the additional obligations. We look after that for them.”
There is strong demand for the service from the financial services sector as well, Clarke says. “Asset management firms and aviation leasing companies can have multiple entities which all need to file tax returns yet only have a small global tax and finance team. We relieve them of that burden.”
And companies don’t need to be very advanced digitally to avail of the service, she adds. “We meet clients where they are and work with them on the journey. We don’t come in and say this is how we have to do it and it needs to be done now. The process can evolve over a number of compliance cycles. We work with clients to identify and address the pain points in areas like data collection and financial statement preparation until we get to the point where data is available where and when it is needed all the time.”
Browne concludes by reiterating the benefits of the service. “It streamlines the compliance effort and makes it less time intensive. This helps companies meet deadlines and gives them peace of mind and confidence that they are meeting all of their compliance obligations and allows them to focus on running their business.”
Learn more about PwC’s connected tax compliance
