>> Hello, I'm John Gotts.
I help clients solve complex tax challenges by helping to deliver quality
data to the right people and enable them with effective processes and technology.
After changing my career focus a few years ago, I have a significant focus on data
and analytics to improve how tax professionals work.
This is fundamental in tax.
We must apply the law to the specific circumstances, and use data for
a tax payer to determine their obligation to pay tax under the law.
At PWC we think of data as the life blood of tax professionals.
Without access to quality data, our ability to provide advice and
guide the business in making decisions is greatly diminished.
For several years, many tax professionals have worked with data in whatever format
was provided to them.
This means highly skilled tax professionals
must spend time collecting and manually manipulating information for their use.
Changes to the source data often require a rework of these manual processes.
Not a great use of time for these subject matter experts.
These challenges play out both within PWC and at our clients.
The solutions we bring to clients focused on people, process, data and technology.
Our solutions usually touch on all four areas and
almost definitely will touch on data.
Helping to deliver quality information to tax professionals
when they need it is a key element of our work.
There are many ways we approach these challenges, including transforming the raw
data, improving the way in which non-standard data is collected and
using analytics to help visualize or bring a different perspective to the data.
Tax is a challenging and technical area of study which traditionally has not how it's
been well understood throughout organizations.
Analytics is helping to bring tax to the forefront
since a well crafted analytics report can communicate in complex content and
improve the ability of the business to make decisions.
Taxes are deadline driven environment.
So, having a clear understanding of the organization's obligations and
tracking the status of those is imperative.
For many organizations, this is a manual and time consuming process.
We've helped many organizations to leverage technology to reduce the effort
and risk associated with these activities.
In addition, the technology allows us to standardize the collection of data across
the globe in real time.