2025 World Tax Guide | Regional profile (Indirect Tax)

The EMEA indirect tax team at Deloitte, which comprises consultants in VAT, GST, and global trade advisory, which includes specialists in customs, excise duties, and export controls. Our practitioners possess a deep comprehension of regulatory intricacies, understand the criticality of industry-specific insights, and recognize the increasing significance of technology in efficiently managing a company's indirect tax processes.

Deloitte’s indirect tax practices across EMEA are at the heart of indirect tax’s evolution, with the EU acting as the engine fuelling the indirect tax debate with new directives, legislation, and other regulations in various “new” indirect tax domains (the Central Electronic System of Payment Information (CESOP), environmental-packaging/plastic taxes/Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), “behavioral” taxation, and digital reporting/VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA), to name a few).

This means that our 1,722 indirect tax practitioners (which are part of a global indirect tax network of more than 3,500 indirect tax practitioners) are contributing (together with Deloitte’s other service lines) to quickly bring broad-scale, tax-aligned business solutions, deploying the right industry-focused local and regional advisors to suit the needs of each client.

Our EMEA practice sets itself apart with a high level of pragmatic experience and innovative spirit, mixed with an industry-specific approach, cohesive strategy, and high-quality services. It offers a collection of indirect tax tools and software, and an array of both virtual and physical Centers of Excellence offering consulting, indirect tax compliance, and trade services. These elements are in sync with Deloitte’s worldwide technology platforms, allowing for a broad range of integrated offerings.

Our European economies are facing various challenges including political instability, inflation, supply chain disruptions, climate change, the need to re-invent industrial processes, as well as the boomerang effects of sanctions. More than ever, companies have a need to help navigate the maze of complexity, reevaluating their supply chains and business strategies while not being able to predict how the future will be. For example, looking at the EU's new ViDA plan as well as environmental regulations, it is extremely difficult to anticipate and define a coherent strategy. At the same time, indirect tax management will likely also be transformed over the next decade. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) also prompts us to consider the future in a different light. It is, therefore, crucial in these times to guide companies through these complexities with trade, customs, and VAT advice that simultaneously enhances cash flow, efficiency, automation, and continuity. Our comprehensive services and technological solutions, mixed with industry knowledge, are key in addressing current and future obstacles. Additionally, there's a growing need for digital transformation in business practices and compliance, despite the lack of uniform regulations. These multiple factors have not been a barrier to growth, but on the contrary, are contributing to it. Those who smartly navigate around them will be the ones grasping the full potential of our new world.

Deloitte EMEA's indirect tax team believes that, in order to assist our clients in the maze of requirements and uncertainties, we should continue investing in innovation and technology. With digital tax requirements becoming more complex, businesses need a new vision around their data and data models, investing wisely to be fit for purpose. The shift from periodic compliance ("push") to real-time data demands by tax authorities ("pull") means companies must interface with various platforms. In this regard, we offer solutions for e-invoicing, e-reporting, and Standard Audit File for Tax (SAF-T); global solutions for traditional compliance reporting; platforms to digitally manage indirect taxes; automated extraction solutions; reconciliation modules; feedback loops processes; indirect tax determination engines; etc. Most importantly, we offer the required architecture and IT structuring to connect everything together (with a client’s ERP system(s) and third-party solutions), making sense of the puzzle with the right cockpits, management reporting, and dashboarding features.

Due to increased complexity, technology investments, and talent shortages, companies are often turning to service providers to manage their indirect tax functions. This can involve outsourcing entire processes, transferring internal advisory roles, or handling key functions like process management and risk management. This approach fosters strong collaboration between companies and service providers, allowing clients to focus on their core strategy while keeping indirect tax operations under control.

In the field of customs and trade, there is a strong demand to externalize customs compliance, Sanctioned Party List screening, mass classification, etc., for which we have developed a series of solutions (Track-on-Trade, Trade Classifier, etc.) to operate such complex processes.

Key service offerings

• Indirect Tax advisory, including VAT and GST, as well as other transaction-based taxes (including new taxes in the field of sustainability and environmental levies);

• Indirect Tax compliance and reporting;

• Indirect Tax automation;

• Indirect Tax strategy, transformation, and Operate (the indirect tax function); and

• Global Trade Advisory (GTA) and compliance;

• Environmental taxes advisory and compliance (CBAM, plastic, packaging, and other local indirect taxes)

Our approach towards data can be qualified as distinctive. Indeed, in the realm of indirect taxes, data is now crucial for key processes like VAT, customs compliance, billing, bookkeeping, e-invoicing, real-time reporting, SAF-T, local taxes, and environmental taxes, necessitating future-proof solutions due to evolving compliance needs. Consequently, Deloitte's indirect tax practices in EMEA have integrated technical experience with their IT and technology practitioners' abilities, yielding advanced tax technology and analytics skills.

Indirect Tax Compliance (ITC) is Deloitte's proprietary technology for effectively managing global indirect tax compliance. It supports over 75 countries, meeting various reporting needs like real-time reporting and e-invoicing. ITC also offers analytics, management reporting, and data visualization. It is a comprehensive platform for VAT compliance and is available as a Software as a Service solution for in-house use. We are working on bringing ITC into a new solution called Digital Tax Compliance (DTC). This new AI-driven platform will be the cockpit to manage data, processes, and reporting to handle end-to-end tax compliance while also enabling multiple digital reporting processes and creating value from available data. It will manage massive data sets from different sources and have strong data-wrangling capabilities while being a two-way interface with a client’s ERP systems, third-party solutions, and tax authorities.

In the context of interfacing, Deloitte's Enterprise Platform (ETP Core) serves as a data lake, automatically extracting information from ERP systems using Deloitte’s proprietary extractor. This data undergoes enrichment, review, and control before being processed through compliance solutions and integrated with various tools such as tax communication platforms, e-invoicing, analytics, and archiving software. The ecosystem connects Deloitte and third-party solutions, automating tasks in a secure environment.

Originally created in Eastern Europe and focusing on specific requirements, Deloitte’s taxCube is a multi-country platform for SAF-T reporting solutions that covers all countries using the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ECD SAF-T standard. It offers a high degree of flexibility, robustness, and user-friendliness. It is built on the OECD SAF-T standard and can be rolled out to all relevant countries using this standard as a basis for their electronic reporting.

Regarding customs and global trade, Deloitte has developed many proprietary solutions, such as Track on Trade, a full-fledged customs and trade compliance solution to manage all relevant filings, licenses, authorizations, and customs regimes in an automated way.

Trade Classifier uses AI and cognitive technologies in the field of harmonized tariff schedule classification (for analyzing customs duties and managing customs compliance, as well as for VAT rate determination and Intrastat preparation).

In the UK, a Global Trade Bureau has been established, i.e., a group of customs brokers to simplify, accelerate, and complete the full customs declaration process on behalf of clients, using state-of-the-art solutions.

In addition to these customs and trade compliance solutions, Global Trade Radar is an analytics solution that uses data sourced from customs authorities to produce detailed, insightful customs analytics across multiple jurisdictions in one dashboard. Opportunities like cost-savings, repayments, and risks, such as potential compliance weaknesses, are identified, and insights are summarized through a series of interactive reports. Such an analytics solution also exists for VAT in the form of the Global VAT/GST Radar, which enables companies to rigorously review the quality of their VAT data and analyze potential deficiencies in their VAT compliance processes through a provisioned system of predefined checks and balances.

Finally, in the field of indirect tax knowledge and structured content, Deloitte has launched its global Indirect Tax Knowledge Hub, an innovative way to capture, gather, curate, and manage indirect tax changes taking place around the world (VAT knowledge, but also environmental taxes, digital requirements, etc.). Indirect Tax Knowledge Hub directly feeds into a series of knowledge-related deliverables, including a Knowledge Portal, a single website for clients to access a wealth of indirect tax knowledge in the form of very detailed and comprehensive topical surveys (more than 4,500 completed surveys are available at this stage, covering 80 countries).

Other recent and specific indirect tax-related solutions include:

• CESOP automated offering to enable payment service providers to report in each EU Member State where they provided payment services. This is a solution in a very sensitive data environment;

• CBAM reporting solutions to automate the generation of relevant reports and CBAM filings;

• Indirect Tax Atlas – a platform to help users understand enacted and upcoming changes in the taxation of indirect taxes (including e-invoicing and e-reporting);

• PxS, an automated VAT solution assisting partially exempt businesses with VAT analysis and modeling, enabling allocations, sectors, and recovery methods to be modeled based on the impact analysis of the overall VAT position. Deloitte is currently developing a reporting module connected to PxS for automating the preparation and filing of insurance premium tax returns.

Deloitte teams across EMEA are also working on various other business applications, such as AI-related applicable use cases for automation of indirect tax processes, chain analyzer, blockchain solutions, chatbots, etc.

Awards

In International Tax Review’s 2023 European Regional Tax Awards, Deloitte again won more awards than any other firm. Some of the pivotal wins are mentioned below:

• Regional Awards:
  • Diversity Equity & Inclusion Firm of the Year
  • Tax Firm of the Year
  • Tax Policy Firm of the Year
  • Transfer Pricing Firm of the Year

• Jurisdiction Awards:
  • National Tax awards: Bulgaria, Middle East
  • National Transfer Pricing awards: Austria, Baltic States, Central and Eastern Europe, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania
  • National Indirect Tax awards: Finland, Luxembourg
  • National Tax Disputes awards: Hungary
    
    
• In the 2022 ITR EMEA Regional Tax awards, Deloitte won more awards than any other firm, with thirty-two awards in total.
  
  
• In the 2021 ITR EMEA Regional Tax awards, Deloitte won more awards than any other firm, with twenty-six awards in total.
  
  
• In the 2020 ITR EMEA Regional Tax awards, Deloitte won the Tax Compliance and Reporting Firm of the Year and the EMEA Tax Firm of the Year.
  
  
• Deloitte has been a Tier 1 Tax adviser in the Gulf region since 2010, according to the International Tax Review World Tax rankings.

Eminent leaders

• Ronnie Dassen, Global Indirect Tax Leader

• Kristine Dozier, Global GTA Leader

• Johan Hollebeek, EMEA GTA Leader

• Rogier Vanhorick,  Global Indirect Tax Digital Leader

• Olivier Hody, NSE Indirect Tax Leader

Contact details

Phone: +1 718 508 6846

Email: ronniedassen@deloitte.com

Twitter: @Deloitte

Website: Deloitte.com/tax

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