Tax management was a term that was little used by companies until a few years ago. The tax director made his management aware of nasty surprises in his department or, preferably, dealt with anything before they developed that way. Other than that, what has now developed into a new practice area of its own, sometimes known as tax risk management, was just another part of a tax director's role, without any more significance than, for example, compliance or structuring.
Regulation has changed all that. Tax authorities are more and more aggressive around the world and having been doing their best to make sure that business managers can have no excuses for ignorance about their tax function. And other regulators, for example accounting standards organisations, with rules such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and FIN 48, have ensured that the relationship between tax has taken on an importance for the rest of the business that it may not have had.
It is in this context that International Tax Review co-publishes the second edition of its Tax Management in Companies guide with PricewaterhouseCoopers. The guide is the 44th in the Tax Reference Library series, which has also covered other topics such as transfer pricing, indirect taxes and outsourcing. They are designed to give in-house tax counsel the most cutting-edge advice for planning their corporation's tax strategy and structuring transactions in these fields. More are on the way.
As the following articles from PricewaterhouseCoopers show, there is a lot more to tax management in companies than making sure that the right amount of tax is paid on time in the places where it should be paid. Stakeholder communication, the role of technology and the structure of the tax function are other topics that contribute to effective tax management in companies.
We hope the insights these specialist tax advisers offer provide you with some valuable knowledge when dealing with the issues.
Ralph Cunningham
Managing editor, International Tax Review
