Global Tax Benchmarking

As a seasoned tax leader, you make key decisions every day to evolve your tax department and keep pace with unprecedented pressures, disruptive technological advancements, heightened compliance obligations and more — all while seeking to demonstrate value within your organization and beyond.

For tax executives of multinational organizations, benchmarking against comparable tax departments can be a powerful tool for reflecting on your current position and planning how to prepare your department for the future. To help, KPMG International conducts an ongoing survey of multinational tax departments. While the number of participants continues to grow, the resulting database is already believed to be the most robust of its kind on a global scale, with input from some 600 multinational tax leaders in more than 70 countries.

The data offers insights into tax departments and how they are evolving in terms of structure, governance, priorities, performance measures, through the use of technology and more.

What do the latest results tell us? Compliance and risk managementare clearly the top priorities for today’s tax leaders, and the tax department’s contribution to strategic value now seems to take priority over cost minimization in many areas.

Looking ahead, companies appear more or less satisfied with their current sourcing models but less satisfied with the ability of their companies’ ERP systems to provide tax data. Many respondents expect their companies to invest in technology changes and, to alesser extent, tax software. When asked what investments they’d most like to see, however, investments in additional personnel tops the list, with tax technology and process optimization not far behind.

This report presents a brief overview of selected key findings from the survey data through to early 2018, and offers some important takeaways for tax leaders.

About the survey

  • KPMG International’s Global Tax Benchmarking Survey charts the evolution of leading tax departments and identifies operational benchmarks for high-performing tax teams.
  • The selected findings in this summary report are based on a survey of 400 leaders in charge of tax policy and operations of companies in all major sectors, with participants from 50 different countries.
  • Over two-thirds of respondent organizations are public companies. About one-third of organizations have more than US$10 billion in annual revenue or turnover. Slightly more than 40 percent of respondent organizations have more than 10,000 employees globally. Almost 60 percent have branches, subsidiaries or other permanent establishments in more than 10 countries.
  • Tax leaders can still participate in the survey. By doing so, you will have the opportunity to receive personalized insights into how your tax department compares across key areas. Please visit kpmg.com/taxbenchmarking or email tax@kpmg.com to learn more.
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