A lot can happen in a year. For the longest time, AEV’s Tax advisory and Compliance Services (TACS) team was belabored with manual processes and handling extremely case-sensitive information.
The most grueling among these is the annual Tax Compliance Review (TCR) for the Group, an extremely time-consuming task that involves crunching the numbers for all 40 Aboitiz business units.
“What we were doing before the process improvement was very manual. For the TCR, we review the submission of the BU’s tax returns which are all in PDF documents,”
—Bethel Tanupan, Assistant Vice President of TACS, AEV
Indeed, the TACS team would have to extract data directly from PDF files for each of the BUs — an act that could take up almost an entire day, per Aboitiz company — before they encoded it to a Google Sheet to be utilized for review and analysis. “While our analysis can be done in two hours, retrieving the numbers will take us almost a day for each business unit,” he added.
Given the inordinate amount of time it takes to complete such an important task, it was no surprise that the TCR was identified in urgent need of process improvement when the team linked up with Aboitiz Data Innovation (ADI) at the start of 2022 as they looked towards boosting their Enterprise architecture (EA) capabilities.
“With ADI, what we thought of was instead of manually transferring each of these numbers to Google Sheets, why not innovate it in such a way that the data from the PDF files will automatically be transferred to the spreadsheet file?” Tanupan pondered.
Their Data Innovation counterparts ran with the concept, and from there, the extraction of the numbers from the documents was drastically cut-down from an almost whole-day affair to a task that can be completed in just 2-3 minutes.
More importantly, this also enables the TCR to potentially minimize human errors and reduce or prevent the accumulation of minor mistakes that could wound up turning costly due to the penalties.
“This project has a direct impact on the business,” AEV Assistant Vice President for Transformation and Business Solutions Joanna Abay declared. “This was really designed to provide BUs with the opportunity to review their returns, and file amendments if required thereby avoiding unnecessary penalties. What’s essential is now we have the capability to ensure that the numerous filed returns consistently matchup, thereby improving the audit process.”
Through this, the BUs are now able to create more accurate self-assessments from the TCR reports ahead of a potential audit from the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR). Should they identify inconsistencies or items in need of correction, they can already anticipate and take the proper course of action well in advance of the review.
“So it’s a very successful story especially when you look back and realize it’s a very taxing past. Pun intended!” Abay quipped.
More importantly, the TACS team hopes that its continued push for innovative projects and efficient systems will go a long way into reinforcing a strong culture of compliance across the Group and especially with team members.
If we make small errors for what seems like inconsequential amounts, our actions collectively as a team member will affect the organization no matter how small it seems. So we really should instill a culture of integrity and responsibility. You are responsible for your company. Your actions affect the company
—Joanna Abay, Assistant Vice President for Transformation and Business Solutions, AEV
Through their own Great Transformation, TACS aims to be a driving force behind the Aboitiz Group as it charts its course on becoming the Philippines’ first techglomerate. For them, there is no innovation too big or too small as they continue to upgrade and enhance the processes which will no doubt be of great value to A-people.
