Healthcare company saves costs implementing new tax function

Challenge

A large national healthcare insurance company had an ongoing traditional tax compliance outsourcing relationship with Grant Thornton. The company’s internal tax director was approaching retirement and as a result the company would lose the historic, in-house tax knowledge to continue the outsourcing relationship. Grant Thornton met with the CFO to discuss a Rightsourcing approach. Grant Thornton’s tax professionals would deploy a multi-phased consultative approach, evaluating the organization’s current processes, pain points and opportunities to modernize and expand the existing outsourcing arrangement.

Solution

While the historic tax director was still on board, Grant Thornton’s tax professionals held several workshops to gain a thorough understanding of and to document the internal, primarily manual, day-to-day processes. Grant Thornton then worked with the new tax director to build out the future state of a new, more automated tax function including:

• Standing up a provision software on Grant Thornton’s licenses tailored to the needs of the organization
• Building out an insurance tax reporting process
• Implementing a data transformation and analytics tool that automates the flow of financial data
• Building out a customized workflow and tax calendar 

Results

The Rightsourcing approach allowed the company to preserve their historic tax knowledge and build out a new, more strategic and automated tax function that streamlined core processes, has greater visibility into year over year insights and addresses unique industry reporting requirements. Additionally, the organization utilizing Grant Thornton tax technology and data solutions gave them access to more sophisticated tax technology and allowed them to release technology licenses they had historically held. After year one, the company is expected to save six figures annually in operational costs with increased economic performance on the Grant Thornton side.