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IBM and EY Launch AI-Enhanced Global Tax Compliance Solutions

In an era where technologies are redefining business landscapes, IBM and the EY organization have taken a significant step forward by launching EY.ai, a suite of AI-powered global tax compliance solutions. This initiative is a profound development in addressing the complex and evolving challenges tax departments face in today’s business environment.

A Strategic Alliance for Innovation

The collaboration between IBM and EY has continuously evolved over the years, demonstrating a commitment to leveraging technology for enhanced business outcomes. With the introduction of EY.ai, powered by IBM's watsonx, both organizations aim to revolutionize how companies handle tax compliance efforts. This strategic alliance combines IBM's cutting-edge AI technologies with EY's extensive industry expertise, effectively reimagining the function of tax from a burdensome administrative task to a strategic value creator.

Martin Fiore, the Americas Deputy Vice Chair – Tax at EY, emphasized the importance of this collaboration: "Our professionals are extending beyond world-class tax technical knowledge and combining their experience with emerging technologies that can produce highly effective outcomes for our clients." This innovative approach enables businesses to tackle critical issues such as resource limitations, multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and talent shortages.

Transforming Tax Compliance Processes

At the core of the EY.ai offering are three initial AI-driven solutions designed to facilitate tax data management and compliance for organizations:

1. Intelligent Tax Data Lake: This solution utilizes IBM watsonx.data and watsonx.ai, along with open-source models, to gather and consolidate crucial transaction data necessary for tax filings. Through enhanced data controls, this tool aids in automating a traditionally manual process, improving the overall quality of tax-related data across various sources.

2. Detect and Correct with Business Documents: By employing watsonx.ai and a specially developed open-source toolkit from IBM Research known as Docling, this solution can extract and verify data from unstructured invoices. This allows for an increase in the number of documents reviewed, significantly automating the corrections required for accurate tax filings.

3. Withholding Tax Determinations: Another cornerstone solution crafted with watsonx.ai simplifies the process of calculating withholding tax rates for individual transactions on a monthly basis. The efficiency gained through this solution enables tax professionals at IBM to assess countless intercompany transactions with greater precision and speed.

The implementation of these solutions within IBM's own tax department has already garnered impressive results, resulting in significant time savings and the automation of many labor-intensive processes. This achievement is part of IBM’s goal to automate up to 80% of its foreign tax compliance efforts, reducing manual workloads and enhancing operational efficiency while ensuring robust data security.

A Future-Ready Tax Landscape

As organizations worldwide grapple with the complexities of tax compliance, the alliance between IBM and EY stands poised to lead the charge in innovative, AI-enabled solutions. The collaboration exemplifies how combining deep domain knowledge with advanced technology can yield transformative results. Kanthi Morrissey, IBM's Vice President and Chief Tax Officer, remarked, "By combining EY domain expertise in tax and IBM's AI technology, we were able to transform the way our tax department handles global tax compliance, freeing up the team to focus on more strategic work."

As the teams work diligently on expanding the scope of these solutions to cover more tax processes, businesses can look forward to a future where tax compliance is not only manageable but also a driver of strategic value and operational excellence.

To find out more about EY.ai and its potential impact on your business, explores the offerings at EY's Tax Division.