Restoring focus through global compliance management

Responding to COVID-19 has knocked global compliance issues down the agenda exposing multinationals to further risk. By reviewing the management of compliance obligations and the role of outsourcing, you can reduce risk and retain focus on core operations.

Global compliance has always presented a complex challenge for the finance teams of multi-national organisations operating in many territories. Local laws, regulations and other domestic specialities make compliance a risky headache. But, for many finance and compliance teams, the global pandemic has increased the challenge of doing business in multiple jurisdictions, heightening the risk of non-compliance risk. The crisis has shifted the priority for chief financial officers (CFO) and chief accounting officers (CAO) onto the near-term – keeping operations going by enabling and adjusting to a remote working environment and carefully managing cashflow.

Tony Thornbury, head of global compliance and reporting solutions for Grant Thornton and based in Dublin, senses that meeting these requirements is proving increasingly difficult: "Business continuity is the priority. The speed with which the global pandemic arrived forced businesses into remote working environments quickly, and the primary focus of multinationals has been keeping the show on the road."

But the compliance risk is still very much alive. “That hasn’t diminished,” Thornbury says. “In a time of competing priorities, global compliance issues may have been pushed down the list, but the risk of not complying in each country remains. And a lack of attention and adherence to the local requirements raises tax issues, fines and even director prosecutions. You may also face risk to your brand and reputation in those local markets too.”

The activities that may have been immediately de-prioritised in the wake of the pandemic are broad and bear various weight and significance across different jurisdictions. They include local GAAP filing, tax returns for local statutory reporting, sales tax compliance (VAT, GFC etc.), payroll administration, local country filings and myriad statistical returns depending on the territory.

Thornbury says: "Payroll is a particularly acute area at the moment. The speed with which government implemented complex mechanisms to support payroll systems and reduce unemployment posed a big challenge for compliance. These programmes have been pretty varied across different countries."

In these challenging times, with increasing pain points for compliance teams, CFOs and CAO are asking if the structures that they currently have in place are as efficient or as robust as they could be.

Compliance is an enduring challenge

Ordinarily, for large corporates operating out of the US, GAAP reporting is the compliance function’s primary concern, while global compliance, although an essential legal requirement, is a secondary issue that follows.

Even at the best of times managing compliance is complicated and can distract business leaders from the core business operations. On top of the regulations in individual jurisdictions organisations face wider complexity including different languages, time zones, and multiple professional services firms in different countries supporting primary reporting, corporate tax and sales tax. “Managing the myriad of issues with multiple suppliers is a headache,” says Thornbury, “especially if you’re dealing with 50 or 60 countries with maybe 30 or 40 different local suppliers.”

From an accounting technology perspective, multinationals often report their core countries on consistent Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP or Oracle, across their leading markets. But sometimes it doesn’t make financial sense to implement the same ERP system in countries where the business is less established, and a local service provider uses a different financial reporting system. However, the greater the disconnect in the systems and underlying infrastructure, the more risk there is when trying to bridge a gap between the primary and secondary reporting infrastructures.

This risk has been heightened by an environment of remote working. A disparate workforce accessing diverse systems creates both cyber security risk as well as a headache for compliance consistency.

By reconsidering how they manage their global compliance obligations more efficiently, businesses can mitigate the risk and return focus to core operations, critical at this time.

Are you ready to outsource compliance?

For businesses looking to outsource their global compliance function, the more consistency they already have in their reporting processes, the simpler it becomes to engage any service provider, particularly one service provider in multiple jurisdictions.

Thornbury says: “If you have a consistent process around the bridge between your US GAAP reporting and your local GAAP reporting, and a similarly consistent process and pulling your corporation tax return out of that it helps. And the more consistency you have across your jurisdictions, country-by-country, the more it lends itself to having an efficient solution from a compliance point of view. The more variants you have in those processes, the more inefficient it becomes.”

Too often, global compliance is an afterthought that does not get prioritised because it is not the primary function of reporting. Because it is not anybody’s prime job, it easily gets ignored. However, if there is chaos going on in the background, that can be extremely expensive and time-consuming to put right. When businesses start getting significant fines from tax people and local reputations are on the line, global compliance rises sharply up the Boardroom agenda.

Businesses have the option to remove the pain of compliance by centralising processes and handing management to a dedicated specialist with access to a network of local experts allowing flexibility across your territories at a time of unprecedented change.