EY and Automation Anywhere are transforming tax functions through Robotic Process Automation

EY, a leading global professional services organization, and Automation Anywhere (AA), a leading global Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution provider are developing RPA based tax automation solutions for the Indian market.

The ongoing tax reforms in India such as the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime, faceless assessment and the upcoming GST IRN compliance regulations is disrupting organizations. In order to keep pace with the dynamic regulatory environment, Corporate tax functions need to fast track their technology adoption curve and adapt to the emerging API driven compliance environment as the new normal.  To help tax functions cope with these changes, EY and Automation Anywhere are building and deploying RPA solutions to automate high volume tax compliance processes across various industry sectors.

The ongoing Covid19 crisis is also an important learning for many organizations to be prepared for an unprecedent time like these and accelerate their transition to digital technologies. “CFOs are now seeing more value in making digital bots as an integral part of their tax workforce”, said Sameer Prakash, Partner and National Leader - Intelligent Tax Automation, EY India. He added, “Deploying tax-related RPA helps to drive cost efficiency, prevent credit leakages, reduce tax compliance risks making it an important element in the digital transformation journey of any organization.”

Using Automation Anywhere’s intelligent automation platform, EY has developed a library of ‘’ready to deploy Tax Bots’’ that automate GST, withholding tax and transfer pricing related processes. 

Highlights of EY Tax Bot library include:

• Aerobot: This Bot helps corporates claim appropriate GST credit available on employee airline travel. The Bot reads through different airline invoices and extracts relevant GST information and matches with the organization data to identify any potential credit losses.

• Hotelbot: This Bot is variant of Aerobot and is used for hotel invoices. This Bot uses AA’s IQbot platform to read from various unstructured sources (such as scanned pdf copies, etc) in order to capture the GST related information and identify any credit leakages

• Input Credit management Bot: This Bot matches that the GST paid on procurements with tax amounts reported in the GST returns of the supplier. It also undertakes follow up actions such as sending regular reminders and flagging negligent vendors in the ERP in order to avoid credit losses

• eWayBill Bot: This Bot automates the ewaybill generation process which is required for movement of goods and handles multiple related reconciliations required to adhere to GST regime

• GST IRN compliance Bot: This series of Bots help manage GST IRN compliance requirements that are likely to come into effect shortly

“Corporates are looking for technology solutions that can help their tax function to efficiently manage their taxes as per the government guidelines. Automation Anywhere’s Intelligent Digital Transformation platform along with EY will increase the potential of customers to transform the way tax departments generally function by automating mundane, labor-intensive and repetitive tasks and letting the employees focus on insight-driven activities,” said Milan Sheth, EVP-IMEA, Automation Anywhere. 

As per Murali Raj, CIO of HIL Ltd., who is one of the early adopters of RPA, HIL started their organization’s RPA journey with tax processes and we are seeing results and business value early in the journey.  By bringing in bots to take on the human-intensive and repetitive work, we have been able to create new efficiencies and build a higher level of agility in our tax compliance processes.”