Compliance Is a Noun, Not a Verb.

Most people in tax think about compliance as something you do, you file the return, you close the audit, you tick the box and move to the next one, it is a verb, an action you repeat on a schedule, and the job becomes a long list of actions completed correctly and on time. The traditional compliance function most of us learned it on is changing underneath us, and the companies getting this right are deliberately moving away from that verb, toward holding a continuous state where the filing is correct by construction rather than correct because someone checked it on time this month. A well built function is compliant the way a well built bridge is structurally sound, continuously, by design, not because an engineer turn up every Tuesday. If your own function hasn't started moving in that direction, because the shift is already happening around you whether you take part in it or not. I say this, not for the protection of the company you work for but as a warning to our industry and jobs, this is happening and i want people to be prepared and to thrieve. Moving toward the noun does not mean building a dashboard on top of the same manual process you have always run. If your control today is a person opening a spreadsheet once a month and eyeballing a list of transactions, putting that same spreadsheet behind a nicer dashboard and calling it digital transformation hasn't changed anything, you've taken a bad process and put a manual loading screen on top of it. Do not roll a dog shit in glitter and tell me it's gold. The actual work is getting into the guardrails themsleves, finding where the real exposure sits, and rebuilding the control so the error becomes unlikely in the first place, rather than just easier to spot after the fact once a month. This is where an audit finding earns it's keep, and most people treat one as a scorecard of failure, something to quietly fix and move past as fast as possible, when really an audit is one of the few genuine diagnostic tools you will get handed in this job, someone else has gone looking for the weak point in your system, done the work, and told you exactly where it is. Finding the same issue twice usually just means you fixed the number the first time and never touched the control that produced it. My boss has a line he uses that I have more or less stolen at this point, let's change it and see what breaks, not as recklessness, more a deliberate way of finding the next weak point before an auditor does it for you. Whatever breaks when you change something gives you the same information an audit gives you, except you chose the timing instead of having it chosen for you. If you only take one thing from this, take the exercise rather than the argument. Pick one control you run today, something routine, the kind of thing you do without really thinking about it anymore, say it's checking that every entry on a return has a valid tax code, and that there are no unusual swings in payments or liabilities compared to the prior period, right now that's probably something you do once a month, by hand, looking at everything regardless of whether anything is actually wrong. Now ask yourself what would need to be true for that same control to run constantly in the background, and only put something in front of you when there is genuinely something to look at. A missing tax code isn't a judgement call, it's a rule, and a system can check for it every time a record is created rather than once a month after the fact, and an unusual swing in liabilities is a threshold, which a system can watch for continuously and flag only the exceptions. You keep the same control, you keep the same purpose, what changes is that you stop doing the checking and start maintaining the thing that checks. Take another one while your at it. Most VAT teams validate customer VAT numbers as part of filing the return, checking a list of IDs before submission and chasing anything that fails, which is still the verb. Ask why that same check couldn't happen at the point of sale instead, before the invoice is even raised, so an invalid VAT number gets caught and queried immediately rather than discovered weeks later when the return is being prepared, same control, same purpose, just moved from a periodic check at the end of the process to something built into the process itself. This is one of a few pieces I have planned on how I see tax careers changing, and how I think tax teams themselves are going to end up redesigned.