06 Oct 2016 e-invoicing to send shock waves through global supply chains
The 8th edition of TrustWeaver’s study says disruptive trends in e-invoice compliance will send shock waves through global supply chains.
TrustWeaver is a provider of Cloud-based trust and compliance services for invoices and other legally critical electronic documents. This week they have published their 2016 edition of their white paper on international trends in tax-compliant e-invoicing. The report features a summary of the regulatory status in some 90 countries, as well as an in-depth analysis of the ways tax authorities around the world use e-invoices to increase collection rates.
According to the white paper, governments have increasingly adopted regulation that forces enterprises to share invoices electronically with them in real-time. Such ‘clearance’ methods are particularly popular in emerging economies, but their vast contribution to closing the so-called ‘VAT gap’ – a percentage that expresses the VAT that should be, but is not collected in a country – is motivating a growing number of developed countries in Europe and other regions to adopt similar approaches. Because governments not only impose their own data standards and authentication methods but also use the law to redefine other business documents –such as delivery notes– for ‘clearance’ purposes, TrustWeaver’s experts predict that this trend is about to massively transform the B2B automation processes that have been developed over the past thirty years.
Among other topics, the white paper provides a useful categorization of e-invoice compliance topics and helpful advice that international enterprises can use to develop a strategy to deal with these intrusive government systems without losing competitiveness. TrustWeaver also notes that these trends in e-government are compounded by the introduction of Cloud-based e-business networks whose standardized procurement and sales processes cannot easily be customized to meet the compliance needs of their millions of connected enterprises. TrustWeaver says that such e-business vendors will increasingly be expected to make compliance an integral part of their service offerings.
The 2016 edition of the TrustWeaver white paper is available upon request from https://www.trustweaver.com/knowledge
