Tax executives: Response to COVID-19

With tax planning and priorities now profoundly shifted, your organization may still be responding to the immediate demands created by COVID-19. Recovery is on the horizon and planning for the transformations required may be on your radar, but the priorities many companies have focused on initially are likely to continue to be relevant for months to come.

Continuing to evaluate the applicability of the following four areas can help tax leaders bring value by increasing cash flow, reducing costs, and enhancing tax positions:

• Income tax planning for cash needs
• Non-income-based taxes 
• Debt issuances, modifications, and restructuring
• Tax operating model considerations

It is critical to understand the changes that are occurring in the business to evaluate relevant tax considerations, staying close to finance, human resources, legal, treasury, and operations leads. Tax modeling of scenarios, including changes to forecasts and impacts on attributes, will need to be performed to provide a broad view of the tax impacts. A few examples of planning available to companies now are described below, but this is by no means a comprehensive list.

Respond, recover, thrive: Looking ahead at tax priorities

As we move from the initial response to COVID-19 and into recovery, we expect businesses to undergo significant workforce, operational, and digital transformations that will require tax executives to think strategically about tax planning and about their organization. By contributing tax expertise to cost reduction, cash generation, M&A, restructuring, and other business strategies, tax can play a valuable role in helping organizations meet immediate demands, emerge stronger, and thrive going forward.