About five years ago, when we surveyed thousands of executives on corporate tax departments trends, I recall one tax executive’s comment vividly… “ The Corporate Tax Department of the Future Will Be Very Different From The Tax Department Of Today.” This comment was emailed to me by a prescient corporate tax executive five years ago. This tax executive provided an insightful understanding of trends that were about to take place. The focus of this post is to discuss trends we now see that are happening behind the scenes in the tax community.

With thirty years’ experience being retained by corporate tax clients to find tax executives, I am highly qualified to discuss hiring trends well in advance of the market understanding the trends currently unfolding around them. The last prediction posted in my blogs a couple of years ago was easy in that I stated once tax professionals start working remotely, they would not want to go back to the office. In this post, I will bring to your attention where we see rising activity in hiring trends and the cost to corporations who do not understand the importance of the technology experts they employ.

Recently, I communicated to a senior management tax executive of a private equity firm my advice on the most important person they should have in-house on their acquisition team. Over the years, they have learned the importance of a strong in-house tax team who can assess the challenges they will face while conducting mergers and acquisitions. While in the past the focus has been on highly strategic tax planning, these teams are becoming ever more careful of the challenges they face in the integration of the software of two separate entities. In some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars of software purchases would not work to integrate two separate systems. This is a software trap many companies are walking into these days. It is messy and it is very expensive.
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