Most tax leaders don’t need convincing that their department should modernize. What’s harder to picture is what modernization actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday — not in a vendor deck, but in the hour-by-hour reality of preparing a return, closing a provision, or answering an auditor’s question.

That gap between wanting to modernize and knowing what “modern” looks like in practice is showing up clearly in the data. According to the 2026 Corporate Tax Department Technology Report, satisfaction with tax technology fell to 34%, from 56% a year earlier. Nearly two-thirds of tax departments (64%) remain stuck in the chaotic or reactive stages of technological maturity, a number that has risen, not fallen. Tax teams aren’t short on ambition. They’re short on a concrete picture of the destination.

That destination isn’t a bigger tech stack. It’s connected tax data, in place of the disconnected handoffs most direct tax teams navigate today. The report calls this the frustration gap — and by its own numbers, it’s widening.

To dig deeper, visit the original article on the Thomson Reuters blog.