Strategies that motivate management to listen to the Tax Department is what we will address in this week’s post. Although there are dozens of topics I could address,  this post will address a couple of challenges faced by most anyone leading a tax organization when it comes to compensating your tax team.  This post will also provide solutions; these are solutions intended to make your job leading a tax organization easier. Although I know better than to put “ Head of Tax” and “Easy” in the same line, leading a tax organization is one of the toughest jobs out there today.

Each year I receive more than one hundred calls from the head of a tax organization; they want to know about compensation. They are all dealing with the same problem on compensation. In fact, often times I will hear that they lost great hires due to compensation structure.  They spent months interviewing and when they made the offer it was just not enough. Most prospective employees are polite and will not tell you the salary is too low when the offer is extended. It is simply an uncomfortable subject for many to discuss directly with you or the HR department. You discover you are wasting so much time getting the talent you really need for this highly technical job when the compensation structure is too low to be competitive. What do you do to solve this problem?

Here is the best solution and I provide this remedy to all my clients. When you hire an experienced expert to find you the people you need; you need to ask them to work up a compensation report on every candidate submitted. Keep in mind these are candidates who come forward to interview with the company as they will give you straight compensation information. Trust compensation information from people who are sincerely interested in the tax role as they know you will likely check the numbers if hired. Information obtained from an expert tax recruiter conducting a thorough search is outstanding; you have a right to acquire it on all retained searches. You then take this data and provide the information to HR who will take it to the compensation board. It takes all the drama out of fighting for salaries because you are armed with accurate data ready for management…end of discussion.

How do you obtain compensation data if you are trying to benchmark your entire tax department? This is a big project but can be done on a budget with companies you trust. Many times people do not want to share compensation data but they will if they know they can trust a study was done by a neutral party and they do not reveal or identify exactly who is compensated what package. These studies cover Company A through Company L (12 similar companies) but not identify who Company A really is . I will have each organization submit a portion of the cost to be shared by 12-20 similar companies and cover all levels and even how it is organized. You keep your costs down and get to the meat of the subject fairly quickly without spending a lot or money.

One more thing I will add is “do not trust data from many sources as they most likely grouped the tax department with the finance and accounting departments”. These kind of reports bring down the salaries of tax professionals and it is frustrating to deal with these as they are absolutely worthless in demonstrating true numbers in tax professional compensation. They waste everyone’s time! I know very well the companies who do their homework and pay their tax professionals enough so no one else can touch them.  Your senior executive management teams may change but you are best armed with the facts if and when they do.

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