Key Takeaways
- Indirect tax teams are shaping decisions the business doesn’t credit them for – pricing, contracts, supply chain, and market entry all carry the function’s fingerprints, but it’s still measured on filing accuracy and deadlines.
- This isn’t a one-market problem. 88% of professionals surveyed rate their own contribution as significant or moderate, but only 32% believe leadership sees it that way.
- Closing the gap costs nothing extra. The functions that close it change how they measure success and how often they’re in the room, then the budget follows.
Increasing the visibility and influence of indirect tax and compliance
Ask an indirect tax lead what they did last quarter, and the answer rarely stops at lodgements. More often the reply would be that they caught a pricing change before it created a GST exposure or were looped into a market-entry decision early enough to structure it properly, instead of untangling it after the fact. What their CFO saw is probably very different: filings were on time, and nothing broke.
That gap, between what the function does and what the business sees and notices, is what a Thomson Reuters Institute survey of 290 indirect tax professionals dubs the ‘contribution gap’. The survey covered the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, but the pattern will be familiar to anyone managing GST across multiple entities, tracking the ATO’s Peppol e-invoicing rollout, or trying to get finance to care about indirect tax before a deal closes, not after. In fact, the survey found that 88 per cent rate their own contribution as significant or moderate, but only 32 per cent believe leadership saw it that way.
This gap is reflective of the way most indirect tax functions are judged – on filing accuracy and timeliness, even though the same team is quietly shaping pricing, contracts, supply chain, and deal structure. Add limited face time with the C-suite, and you get a function that’s earned a seat at the table, just not always the right one.
What you’ll find in the report
- What separates top-performing indirect tax functions from the rest, based on the survey of 290 professionals
- Why indirect tax is undervalued by leadership, and why C-suite access matters more than ever
- How to quantify indirect tax’s contribution using metrics that capture business value, not just compliance output
- How fixing system fragmentation, the quiet drain on strategic capacity, increases the function’s visibility
- Why AI adoption is nearly universal but shallow, and what deliberate deployment actually looks like
- Ten practical actions top-performing functions can use to close the contribution gap, starting today
Download The Contribution Gap for the full findings and the ten steps top-performing indirect tax functions are using to make their contribution visible.
