For many years, tax and finance departments in large multinational companies have been working hard to transform their tax processes. There has been much investment in back-office systems, particularly enterprise resource planning systems. In-house tax departments have made great strides towards change, looking for improved efficiency, better control and reduced cost.
Meanwhile, in the tax functions of professional partnerships, the job of preparing the partnership tax statement and the individual partners’ personal tax returns has, in many cases, continued in the tried, tested and traditional way. Much of the process is performed by hand, re-keying and reworking the same data many times over. It relies greatly on co-operation from individual partners, who often suffer the hassle and annoyance of handling data manually.
