Highlights
- Poor tax data visibility, not a lack of effort, keeps under-resourced teams stuck in reactive work instead of strategy.
- Limited visibility lowers forecasting confidence: only 26% of under-resourced departments feel confident, compared with 43% of properly resourced ones.
- Clear tax data speeds discrepancy detection, strengthens provision estimates, cleans up audit trails, and surfaces compliance risk earlier.
Every tax department is being asked to do the same thing right now: cover more jurisdictions, meet more reporting requirements, and manage more data — with the same team they had last year. It’s not a temporary crunch. It’s the new baseline.
According to the 2025 Thomson Reuters Institute State of the Corporate Tax Department report, 58% of tax departments now describe themselves as under-resourced, up sharply from 51% just a year earlier — the real cost of running disconnected systems on too few hands. These are teams that have already run out of hours to give, however hard they push.
The instinct, when the workload outpaces the team, is to push everyone to move faster. But speed isn’t the constraint. Visibility is. Tax teams don’t have a motivation problem — they have a data problem. And until that data is visible, organized, and trustworthy, no amount of extra effort closes the gap.
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How poor tax data visibility drains your team’s time
Why limited tax data visibility reduces forecasting confidence
What are the benefits of good tax data visibility?
Where this visibility comes from
The lever that’s still available
How poor tax data visibility drains your team’s time
Ask tax professionals how they’d like to spend their time, and the answer is consistent: more strategy, less scrambling. The same Thomson Reuters Institute State of the Corporate Tax Department report found that tax professionals currently spend more than half their time on reactive, tactical work — when they’d ideally spend up to 70% of their time on strategic, proactive analysis instead.
That gap traces back to where the data lives: the classic tax data silos, a dozen places at once — spreadsheets, email threads, disconnected systems — with someone stuck manually tracking it all down before any real analysis can begin. It’s not unusual for a department’s most experienced tax professionals to spend most of their week moving data instead of doing tax work. Every hour spent reconciling and re-entering data is an hour not spent forecasting, planning, or advising the business.
The 2026 Corporate Tax Department Technology Report found that 55% of tax departments are still stuck in the “reactive” stage of technology maturity, a number that has barely moved in years — a sign of a structural problem, not a passing phase. Teams know they need to move from reactive firefighting to proactive planning. They just don’t have the visibility to get there yet.
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Why limited tax data visibility reduces forecasting confidence
The cost of low visibility shows up most clearly in how tax leaders answer one question: can you trust your own forecast? Among under-resourced departments, only 26% say they’re confident they can deliver timely, accurate forecasting. Among properly resourced departments, that number climbs to 43%.
That’s the real price of not being able to see your own data clearly — not just slower work, but less confidence in the numbers finance and leadership are relying on, and one of the clearest warning signs that a year-end close is already at risk. And the pressure to close that gap isn’t easing. The Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report 2026 describes this as a “Scale” challenge: corporate tax and compliance functions are being asked to absorb growing volumes of work without a matching increase in headcount. Visibility is what makes that kind of scale possible without sacrificing accuracy or confidence along the way.
What are the benefits of good tax data visibility?
When a tax team can see its data clearly — where it lives, whether it’s complete, whether it reconciles — the benefits show up in specific, measurable ways:
- Faster discrepancy identification. Mismatches surface while they’re still small, before they cascade into bigger errors downstream.
- More confident provision estimates. Provision numbers are only as good as the data behind them, and the cost of provision errors goes well beyond the penalty itself. Clear, current data means less second-guessing and more tax provision confidence in the estimate you’re putting in front of leadership.
- Cleaner audit trails. Visibility that’s built in from the start holds up under scrutiny — no scrambling to reconstruct how a number was calculated after the fact.
- Earlier detection of compliance risk. Issues get caught while there’s still time to act on them, not after a filing deadline has already passed.
A clearer view of the data the team already has — not a bigger team — is what closes this gap. It’s the foundation real capacity planning depends on, and most tax departments are still working to get there. The 2026 Corporate Tax Department Technology Report found that only 36% of tax professionals say automation has significantly improved accuracy and reduced errors so far. The opportunity here is still wide open.
Where this visibility comes from
This kind of visibility comes from giving your team a platform built to make the tax data visible from the start — not from asking them to track more things by hand.
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE Workflow gives your team workflow transparency across the entire tax process — tasks, documents, and deadlines across every jurisdiction — with a full audit trail built in from the start. Instead of chasing status updates or reconstructing what happened after the fact, your team can see exactly where every piece of work stands, in real time.
Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE DataFlow addresses the layer underneath: the data itself. It standardizes how data is collected at the source — workpapers, tax packages, provision inputs — creating a single source of truth — and validates it before it ever reaches a spreadsheet. That means the numbers feeding your provision and compliance work are clean and consistent from the start, not cleaned up after the fact. That shift, from tracking data down to trusting it on arrival, is what turns the traditionally tortured journey from source system to tax return into something closer to a straight line.
Together, they give your team the visibility to catch discrepancies early, stand behind provision estimates with confidence, keep audit trails clean by default, and spot compliance risk while there’s still time to act — with the team you already have.
The lever that’s still available
The jurisdictions your team covers aren’t shrinking. The reporting demands aren’t easing. And for most tax departments, headcount isn’t growing to match either one. Working harder within that reality has a ceiling. Working with better visibility doesn’t.
See how Direct Tax solutions from Thomson Reuters can give your team the visibility to keep pace — without adding headcount.
