Most CFOs treat the tax department the way they treat the boiler room of a building. As long as nothing is on fire, the staffing model is working. Headcount stays flat. Software requests get deferred. Compliance gets done. The audit closes. From the top of the org chart, tax looks like a function that scales gracefully: quiet, dependable, and inexpensive relative to its risk surface.
That picture is almost always wrong, and the gap between picture and reality is one of the more expensive blind spots in modern finance leadership. The problem isn’t that tax departments are under-resourced in the obvious way. The problem is that the costs of running them lean show up in places CFOs don’t typically look, on lines that don’t typically get attributed back to tax.
To dig deeper, visit the original article on the Thomson Reuters blog.