Changes in Tax Compliance Challenge Global Business—Part Two

Part Two in a two-part blog series. Read Part One.

Fortunately for customers facing this complex and rapidly changing indirect tax landscape as I described in Blog One, SAP has developed a series of advanced tax solutions. These offerings provide integrated, cost-reducing automation of determination, reporting, and payment requirements across markets of operation. SAP maintains a global application framework for GST and VAT compliance which includes dynamic tax solution and service partner support. Among these indirect tax solutions are the four key offerings below.

SAP Indirect Tax Solutions

SAP Tax Service

SAP Tax Service is a multi-tenant SAP cloud microservice that helps to determine and calculate applicable country-specific indirect taxes as a single source for multiple systems.

• The service includes pre-delivered tax determination and calculation content for 140 countries.
• Tax rates are time bound, and the tax service helps to ensure the application of valid tax rates on transactions on given dates.
• The service provides a solution-independent API and Tax Partner Framework for the integration of multiple tax engines and tables for specific countries.

SAP Tax Compliance

SAP Tax Compliance provides a central repository of all tax compliance rules and checks, documenting rule-sets with comprehensive tax check logic, managing and organizing tax compliance check scenarios and ensuring auditability with simulations on tax check parameterization.

• SAP Tax Compliance executes screening at any desired periodicity, runs the tax screen scenarios, monitors anomalies, and automatically identifies duplicate accounting documents.

The solution allows the interrogation of compliance issues with intuitive screens and navigation. System-created remediation tasks are automatically routed to users for corrections that are documented for auditability with the processing status of hits and checks updated for subsequent filing runs. Tax Compliance improves check rules and scenarios by monitoring the corrections that are implemented and measures performance on a continuous basis.

SAP Document Compliance

SAP Document Compliance supports the registration of electronic invoices and other documents required by local tax authorities, arranging these documents in the government-defined formats.

• This solution is based on SAP ERP, catering to country format mapping, XML file generation and the certified connection to the authorized electronic communication platform.
• SAP Document Compliance provides a central access point for submission monitoring, data error handling and the tracing of source documents.
• The solution maintains a record of legal changes across all components with integration to the SAP back end, providing a single interface for multiple countries and documents and simplified implementation via pre-packaged content.

SAP Advanced Compliance Reporting

SAP Advanced Compliance Reporting is natively integrated with SAP S/4HANA Finance to provide a dashboard for tax reporting compliance. The solution monitors tax changes in real-time to enable seamless and efficient reporting across legal authorities. Pre-delivered global reporting content enables commercial organizations to create or extend additional legal reports through user friendly tools with out-of-the-box support for direct communication to tax authorities. The SAP localization hub, advanced compliance reporting service is the certified SAP interface to automated national tax filing systems.

Learn More

• Read Part One of this blog post, where I covered all the latest news on electronic tax compliance across the world.
• Explore and get more information on SAP solutions for tax compliance on their product pages.
• You can also learn more about the full range of SAP Finance and Risk offerings by reviewing the other blogs in our GRC series.