MAY 2021LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW8IN MY OPINIONfew years back, we started the journey of automating several components of the indirect tax processes into RPA. For those who are not familiar, indirect tax (we should say "transactional tax") is the area of taxation where taxes are levied on each transaction. The most commonly known transactional tax is the VAT. However, some countries also have transactional withholding taxes or additional specific-purpose transactional taxes such as levies for education, public transportation, or health. Why is transactional tax so demanding for requiring RPA? Transactional tax gives no option, but to have the taxes calculated correctly at the moment when the operator presses enter on the transactional booking. Given sometimes incredible volumes, legal requirements of recoding and accruing taxes instantly, any other option is closed out. For us in a multinational company, the driver for introducing RPA came several years back, from the sudden need of updating large amounts of master data records. We are now 2.5 years later, and our understanding of the use of the RPA has much evolved.The enclosed points are the results of many discussions about using RPA robots in our department.Our Governance Rules in A NutshellWe had to clarify rather quickly what we need RPA for, what doesn't require RPA, what we want to achieve, and how we want to measure its benefits. All these are basic questions composing the governance model of RPA for Indirect Tax.The following are, therefore, our own definitions, and I would totally understand if some companies or specializations would adopt other standpoints when the driving RPA in-house.What RPA is For in Our Indirect Tax EnvironmentWe focus on building robots to address a process or sub process with a) meaningful volume, b) repetitive actions, c) criticality of execution (i.e. on a specific event or on a particular date, or both), and, d) that can be executed by a robot managed centrally from a production centre.It might be tough to some, but any robot not in line with these criteria has a large chance of being rejected. As a matter of facts, RPA can be used for anything; it may even be misused as a substitute of workflow, of an ETL tool, or excel macro. Being clear on what it is intended for, helps in staying focused.What We Intend to Achieve with RPAOver time, we see three gradual levels of use for our robots:1) RPA-mimicking-humans: Robots as an aide sitting on an individual desktop, which enables creating a series of fast actions and are launched as attended "scripts" into a side window. This is usually how the adventure into RPA-land starts.2) RPA-data-integrator: Robots that run attended or unattended whose purpose is integrating data. These robots aim at creating complex integration driven by business users­this is important. Such robots respond to basic needs that are required quickly, that would be too long to detail to traditional IT development, and that the process users need in order to have transactions in order.3) RPA-Virtual-worker: Robots whose intent is to monitor and react to specific events, exactly as if a permanent staff would constantly monitor incoming transactions. The usual type of events modelled is errors, which we want to prevent. In our case, errors such as misused transactions, or misused data, or VAT rates, or exemptions, or wrong master data, etc.. Such robots behave as permanent staff never going to sleep, and capable identify and send (and more actions) the lists of faulty transactions.Structure of the RPA EnvironmentThe RPA investment consists os implementing a development team, a production environment collecting the "portfolio" of robots, defining a governance model, and an owner for this governance model.RPA USE IN INDIRECT TAXATIONBy Felix Hassine, VP Corporate Tax at Kuehne+NagelA
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