Deloitte EMEA Regional Profile (Indirect Tax)

Practice overview

Value-Added Tax (VAT), Goods and Service Tax (GST), and other transaction-based taxes:

In a world hit by instability and crisis, the pace of change remains high, pushing taxpayers to thoroughly review the way they manage their indirect taxes, comply with new regulations (digital and real-time reporting, e-invoicing, etc.), and respond to new taxes, requirements, and obligations such as for example C-BAM, sustainable supply chains, plastic/packaging/environmental taxes, etc. Disruption, high inflation, and environmental and energy crisis are additional factors to consider when building efficient supply chains. Governments are also seeking to increase their state revenues through digitalization, data mining, and efficient audits as well as strict new regulations to combat fraud. All these factors contribute to the need to accelerate the digitalization of indirect tax processes, as well as adapting business models, organizations, and strategies. As a result, managing indirect taxes, keeping track of continuous change, investing in automation, and keeping risk under control remains more than ever essential challenges for companies.

Deloitte’s indirect tax group, including VAT, GST, and global trade advisory (customs, excise duties, and export controls) personnel, are specialists in understanding the nuances and complexities of regulations, the importance of deep industry knowledge as well as the growing importance and role of technology to help companies successfully operate their indirect tax function.

About Deloitte EMEA indirect tax: 

Deloitte’s indirect tax practices across EMEA include 122 indirect tax partners and over 1,700 indirect tax professionals. This feeds into a global indirect tax network of more than 3,000 indirect tax professionals working alongside and together with Deloitte’s other service lines to bring broad-scale, tax-aligned business solutions. The practices’ stated mission is to deploy the right industry-focused local and regional teams quickly to suit the needs of each client.

Key differentiators include a focus on industry specialism; a unified strategy and quality standards; a suite of Deloitte proprietary indirect tax tools, software, and products; and a network of virtual and physical Centres of Excellence (COEs) supporting expert advisory, indirect tax compliance, and global trade services. These are aligned with Deloitte’s technology platforms globally, providing a wide scope of integrated offerings.

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 and Compliance (GTA).

In the course of 2022 and 2023, our European economies have experienced yet another (post-pandemic) crisis, impacted by various external factors causing inflation, disruption in supply chains, and direct/indirect effects of sanctions adopted by the EU. This has led to many discussions with companies reviewing their supply chains, business models, and processes and/or being subject to thorough indirect tax audits. At the end of 2022, we also had the EU publishing its ambitious VIDA (VAT in the Digital Age) plan, which will deeply transform how indirect taxes are managed in the next decade. At the same moment, the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its multitude of solutions triggers a reflection on how indirect taxes will be managed in the (very near) future.

More than ever, the emphasis is on assisting companies to navigate through complexity, focusing efforts on the multitude of trade, customs, and VAT-related measures taken by the EU and other governments, advising and assisting to help cash flow, liquidity, process efficiency, and business continuity-related strategies. This is where our wide spectrum of offerings, IT solutions, and deep industry expertise makes the difference in helping companies tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow. Besides short-term strategies, the need for digitalization (of business models, accounting, and compliance processes) is increasing everywhere, while requirements are developing, albeit not in a harmonized way.

Deloitte practices in EMEA have continued investing in various technologies and solutions to help companies track, monitor, and handle the various local country legislative changes.

Creating a future-proof indirect tax data model is more than ever at the heart of many concerns, with companies realizing that navigating through the maze of digital tax requirements requires investments and/or a new vision. Besides the shift from a “push” (traditional periodic compliance and reporting combined with a tax control framework) to an increased “pull” approach (tax authorities requiring relevant indirect tax data sets, almost continuously and in real-time pulling data from companies’ systems), companies have to think about how they can be interfacing with many different platforms and systems.

Finally and closely connected to increased complexity, technology investments required, and scarcity of talent, companies are more and more looking at their service provider, such as Deloitte, to assist in ‘operating’ their indirect tax function, either by outsourcing an entire process (VAT and local taxes compliance or for example customs compliance, SPL screening, mass classification, etc.), transferring the internal advisory function (towards business, IT, finance, and other company stakeholders) or even asking to manage key function essentials, such as process, technology, advisory, and risk management on their behalf.

This new approach creates a great collaboration platform between companies and their service providers, bringing peace of mind to clients, and enabling them to concentrate on their core strategy while leaving the operational side of managing indirect taxes well under control.

Technology

The most important concept in the world of indirect taxes is more than ever ‘data’, which is central to so many key processes (traditional VAT and customs compliance but also billing, bookkeeping, e-invoicing, real-time reporting, standard audit file for tax (SAF-T), local listings and local taxes, new environmental taxes, and then reconciliations, analytics, etc.) and is required to be ‘future proof’, considering new and un-harmonized compliance requirements developing everywhere.

As such, Deloitte’s indirect tax practices in EMEA have combined their technical specialization with the technology capabilities of Deloitte’s IT and tech professionals. This has resulted in the development of deep tax technology and analytics capabilities.

Indirect Tax Compliance (“ITC”) is a Deloitte proprietary compliance technology offering, designed and developed to support centralized delivery of global indirect tax compliance, enabling increased efficiency and quality in the preparation process for indirect tax returns. It covers more than seventy-five countries and a wide variety of reporting requirements, including real-time reporting, SAF-T requirements, Making Tax Digital, e-invoicing, etc. In addition to these customizable features, ITC offers analytics capabilities, management reporting, and data visualization through dashboards that provide process and trend analysis information. ITC is a true ‘platform’ to manage VAT compliance and is one of the most globally advanced, broad ranging, and user-friendly solutions on the market. It also exists as a ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) solution, for companies that wish to operate indirect tax compliance activities in-house.

In this context, Deloitte has also developed the concept of Enterprise Platform (ETP Core) which is a “data lake” concept, allowing data to be automatically extracted from companies’ ERP systems (using our own Deloitte developed data Extractor solution), being subject to services of data enrichment, wrangling, and other review/check/control activities, before being processed (through ITC or other compliance solutions) and pushed automatically through various tools (including communication platforms with tax authorities, e-invoicing, dashboard and analytics tools, management reports, deliverables in various formats, archiving software, tax determination processes, etc.). Such an ecosystem is extremely powerful, connecting Deloitte and non-Deloitte solutions, performing required activities around the same data in a protected and automated environment.

Regarding customs and global trade, Deloitte has developed many proprietary solutions, such as Track on Trade, a fully-fledged customs and trade compliance solution to manage all relevant filings, licenses, authorizations, and customs regimes in an automated way; Trade Classifier, which uses artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies in the field of harmonized tariff schedule classification (for assessing customs duties and managing customs compliance, but also for VAT rate determination and Intrastat preparation); CustomsClear, a UK-developed solution to enable companies to easily draft and file customs declarations in a user-friendly app environment. In the UK, a Global Trade Bureau has also 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. Next 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 compliance weaknesses, are identified, and insights are summarized through a series of interactive reports. Such 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 assess 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.), directly feeding into a series of knowledge-related deliverables, including a Knowledge Portal, a single website for clients to access a wealth of indirect tax knowledge.

Other indirect tax-related solutions include:

• Moonlit A.I., an artificial intelligence-powered predictive solution analyzing indirect tax-related issues based on European Court of Justice case and other related indirect tax decisions;
• VATbot, the Deloitte VAT chatbot, which helps to determine VAT treatments as well as analyze indirect tax cases and transactions in an innovative way;
• 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 modelling, enabling allocations, sectors, and recovery methods to be modelled 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 VAT Cube (a solution focusing on SAF-T, real-time reporting, and e-invoicing across various jurisdictions), the chain analyzer, blockchain solutions, etc.

Awards

In International Tax Review’s 2022 European Regional Tax Awards, Deloitte again won more awards than any other firm, with thirty-two awards. Some of the pivotal wins are mentioned below:

• Regional Awards:

o European Diversity Equity & Inclusion Firm of the Year
o European Indirect Tax Firm of the Year
o European Indirect Tax Rising Star
o European Tax Firm of the Year (for the sixth consecutive year);
o European Tax Compliance & Reporting Firm of the Year (for the sixth consecutive year);
o European Tax Innovator of the Year
o European Tax Policy Firm of the Year
o European Tax Practice Leader of the Year
o European Tax Technology Provider of the Year

• Jurisdiction Awards:

• • National Tax awards: Africa, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Central and Eastern Europe, Romania
  • National Transfer Pricing awards: Austria, Baltic States, Belgium, Central and Eastern Europe, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Middle East, Norway, Portugal, Sweden
  • National Indirect Tax awards: Germany, Luxembourg
  • National Tax Disputes awards: Poland, Romania

• In ITR’s 2021 European Regional Tax awards, Deloitte won more awards than any other firm, with twenty-six awards in total.
  
  
• In ITR’s 2020 European Regional Tax awards, Deloitte won the Tax Compliance and Reporting Firm of the Year and the European Tax Firm of the Year.
  
  
• In ITR’s 2019 European Regional Tax awards, Deloitte won more awards than any other firm, with seventeen awards in total.
  
  
• 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, Deloitte Global Indirect Tax Leader
• Kristine Dozier, Deloitte Global Trade Advisory Leader
• Johan Hollebeek, Deloitte Global EMEA Trade Advisory COE Leader
• Rogier Vanhorick, Deloitte Global Indirect Tax Digital Leader
• Olivier Hody, Deloitte 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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