EY announces expansion of Tax and Finance Operate digital solution suite with Microsoft

- Tax and Finance Operate (TFO) solution suite helps multinational organizations improve financial operational effectiveness and efficiency

- TFO solution on new EY Global Tax Platform, powered by Microsoft Azure, shares information, automates, and digitally enables tax and finance processes in the cloud

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Dec 10, 2018, 03:00 ET

LONDON, Dec. 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- EY today announces the significant expansion of the Tax and Finance Operate (TFO) digital solution suite with Microsoft, as part of the EY and Microsoft alliance. The expansion is intended to help tax and finance functions of multinational organizations better utilize digitally-enabled tax and finance services without having to staff and invest in building the data and functional solutions themselves.

As part of this initiative, to help companies accelerate digital transformation and amplify business performance, EY is launching a new Global Tax Platform (GTP), powered by Microsoft Azure under the focus of the EY and Microsoft alliance: Your Digital World. Realized.

This set of digitally-enabled services takes advantage of Microsoft's leading cloud and security capabilities in concert with EY's broad industry-specific experience and tax/finance knowledge, allowing clients to fundamentally re-imagine their tax and finance functions and outcomes. EY GTP helps EY TFO clients to improve the efficiency of their tax function through a range of digitized tax services including management accounting, statutory accounting, corporate income tax and value added tax (VAT) returns, leveraging the elasticity of Microsoft Azure and unique data analytics capabilities, while being designed to take advantage of increasingly rich capabilities as new innovations occur.

Kate Barton, EY Global Vice Chair – Tax, says:

"Organizations have increasingly higher expectations of their tax and finance functions. Many are looking to alternative models that better keep pace with ever-changing technology options, become more strategic, improve tax and financial outcomes, reduce costs, and secure the right talent for their needs.

"Led globally by Dave Helmer, EY Global Tax and Finance Operate Leader, the EY TFO service is enabled by EY GTP, which allows EY clients to adapt a highly flexible, scalable and cost-effective set of tax technology solutions to their unique needs, all with the confidence that they're supported by Microsoft's advanced digital technologies."

Based on automated data capture, standardization and reuse, as well as featuring advanced analytics and intelligent automation, the platform provides tax constituents with access to a growing suite of tax and finance services while becoming the reference platform for all digital tax preparation, analytics and insight creation across EY clients.

The platform's secure cloud environment also helps provide EY clients and third parties with high-integrity control and near real-time access to the right data at the right time, as well as a shared data environment for seamless integration with third-party tax technology and services for tax process validation, data analytics and tax filing.

Dante DeWitt, EY Global Chief Technology Officer, Tax and EY Global Tax Platform Leader, says:

"EY GTP is a great example of technology supporting more intelligent tax and finance services, bringing together the power of big data, advanced analytics, AI and automation to better support the evolving needs of tax functions within multinational organizations. The EY alliance with Microsoft helps accelerate EY clients' digital transformation by tailoring advanced tax and finance services platformed on EY GTP that support the EY vision for the tax and finance functions of the future."

Bringing together deep tax knowledge from EY with Microsoft technology, the TFO service and associated GTP platform provides EY clients with enhanced capabilities that would otherwise be expensive and challenging to build solely in-house. Tax and finance function operations can be managed through EY GTP, and a modular suite of TFO services, such as internal reporting, direct taxes, and indirect taxes, can be built to fit specific requirements depending on organizational need. Organizations can also view a real-time status of their tax filings on a single dashboard and benefit from increased transparency, new data insights, and enhanced decision-making, reaching further into the clients' operations for increased benefits.

Daniel Goff, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Tax and Trade, Microsoft, says:

"EY and Microsoft are working together to support the digital transformation many organizations are currently undergoing by enabling innovative and disruptive new services in finance, accounting, and tax. With the EY TFO suite and enabling GTP, the power of Microsoft Azure and analytics capabilities is now available to organizations globally, and the barriers to complex data capture and analysis are broken down. EY TFO and GTP help organizations gain more relevant and actionable insights from their tax and finance data at greater cost-effectiveness, enabling joint resources to focus on the most strategic finance and tax issues."