Mike Glover Interview: Achieving Indirect Tax Compliance Success
The landscape of indirect taxation is evolving rapidly, with businesses facing new compliance challenges and opportunities in the digital economy. In a recent interview with the marcus evans group ahead of the Indirect Tax Directors Summit 2025, Taxually’s Chairman & Co-Founder, Mike Glover, shared his insights on how businesses can stay ahead of these changes. Here is the full interview below:
“Indirect tax directors should look carefully at how they currently manage their compliance process, ensuring it is as efficient and future-proof as can be. They should use the most advanced technology possible, look at the best way of deploying personnel, be ready for a future that is increasingly efficient, and have greater insight into their data and entire tax compliance process,” says Mike Glover, Chairman & Co-Founder, Taxually.
Taxually is a sponsor company at the marcus evans Indirect Tax Directors Summit 2025, taking place September 18-19 in London.
How is the international tax landscape changing? What future or trends does the tax function need to prepare for?
For a long period of time, there has been a reliance on shared service centres, such as in India, Central Europe, etc. Many processes were undertaken in a back office outside the headquarters. That was how services improved, in many ways, but there was always a limit to how far things could improve. The lack of technology caused a limit on the scaling capabilities of service providers. Automation technology has improved significantly over the last ten years and is bringing that approach to an end. It is clear there is nothing more efficient than automation.
In the past few years, some providers have re-designed indirect sales tax technology to be web-native, making it easier to deploy. The entire industry is moving in that direction. Efficiency will come through technology jumps forward, and AI will play an increasingly big role in that.
There will also be some amalgamation in the tax compliance industry. Some of the smaller providers will start to collect into the larger more automated players. Without excellent technology, it will be more and more difficult to succeed in this business. Tax directors should also prepare for this trend.
With indirect tax compliance, what are tax directors and departments struggling with the most?
The biggest area they struggle with is the quality of the data that is put into their financial systems. Once the wrong data is put into the ERP system, it is very difficult to correct it. Repeated errors is a big issue in the compliance world. The same errors come through month after month. The way to address that is to have technology that recognises those errors and automatically corrects them in the indirect tax compliance process, and makes sure the output is accurate and complete by the time returns are filed. Staff in the tax function spend a large part of their time trying to clean and improve data that can be done automatically with the right technology.
What is unique about your technology or approach? Can it simplify international tax compliance?
Our technology has always been cloud-native, developed with the future in mind. It is the first, and at the moment the only existing end-to-end solution within one technology that can be deployed globally. It covers compliance processes from the very beginning, VAT registration of companies, to data collection, data improvement and cleansing, putting the data into formats required for filing by various authorities around the world, all in one system. It also covers the sales and use tax world of the US, making it very difficult to replicate by other providers.
On top of that, we have used AI to make our technology even more efficient and streamlined. With the right technology, it is possible to identify interesting trends in the data, and have a global view of the entire compliance process. At any point in time, there is transparency on the quality of the data, the efficiency of the process, and what stage it is at. We have seen many large multinationals having great difficulty in being able to say where they are in the tax compliance process.
How can they “future-proof” themselves?
Companies spend a lot of time and money on compliance services, and they should not do things in a certain way just because they have always done so. They need to embrace the latest technology to improve on efficiency and anticipate changes that are coming in legislation and technology, making sure they don’t fall behind in the way those services are deployed. They need to meet the demands of the digital age, which are increasing year by year. Many other industries are also having to look at how things are evolving, what it means for their people, and how they deploy services in the future.
