Building a future-proof (global) tax team

Dominik Wellmann leads the tax department at Mercedes-Benz in Germany. When a difficult stretch for the automotive industry led to voluntary severance across the business, a significant part of his tax team took it and there was no budget to hire replacements. The same obligations, the same deadlines, far fewer hands. He was offered the package himself and stayed, because it was the chance to redesign a tax department in a way he might never get again. His approach starts with what he calls brutal transparency.

Now is the time to create something new and to transform a tax department in a way I might never be able to do again, because I have the full freedom to redesign my department. 

Brigitte Baumgartner is the founder of The Tax Graph. After twenty years as an international tax lawyer specializing in transfer pricing, she moved into tax technology and now guides multinationals through transformation. She arrives at the moment an organization has decided something must change, which has given her a clear view of why these projects succeed or quietly die. Her discipline is to start with people rather than processes, and to treat adoption as a question of habit rather than sign-off. 

What you want to change with technology are habits and human ways of doing things. You want to change human behavior. That's the end goal. 

Ruben van Aarle hosts the session and brings the view from across the tax teams Keeyns works with.

He co-founded Keeyns with his brother Ramon van Aarle. Both their tax journeys started over 25 years ago at Arthur Andersen. Leading a change project at just 30, he saw that even in the largest corporations, manual work was still the foundation of tax. Alongside this in-house project, he founded his own tax advisory firm, Taxperience. Out of frustration with the manual work, the dozens of spreadsheets and the knowledge living only inside tax professionals' heads, the brothers began developing Keeyns: a tax management platform that makes the lives of tax leaders easier every day.