Can the buddy system
work in business?
(Spoiler: Yes!)

These are times of great transition in business, and the retail industry is no exception.

That is what one retailer was experiencing; changes to the business were overwhelming its tax department, and the bottleneck was preventing growth.

The tax team was finding it difficult to manage the volume and complexity of requests from both within the business itself and taxing jurisdictions. Why? Because the business model for which tax was designed was already resource constrained and missing newer skills related to technology. So finding people with specialized multi-jurisdictional fuel tax knowledge—along with experience in related fuel tax technology—was challenging, to say the least.

Further complicating the picture, the company was in the middle of a finance transformation and implementing new systems that would directly affect fuel tax compliance.

Effects of these constraints and challenges were rippling outward through the entire business. Multiple demands on the same people on the tax team created challenges completing compliance obligations (which were themselves becoming more complex); and if the team couldn’t meet compliance, they couldn’t take on the additional projects the company would need to grow the business.

It was a repeating (and unfortunately all too common) cycle. If tax team leadership was to serve as the trusted business partners and advisors their C-suite needed, there would need to be a change.