Nice to see the Wall Street Journal headlining some good news this morning — “Tech Spending Bounces Back as Profits Rise” — and let’s all cheer some impressive earnings reports from Cisco et al. IT spending, which was in the pits much of last year and 2008, has been staging a modest comeback. A December study from Gartner projects total IT spend in the U.S. (for both products and services) at around $960 billion for 2010, up from $930 billion in ‘09.

What I’m wondering is how much, if any, of that money will be heading corporate tax’s way.

Tax departments sorely need it. Despite a burst of investment in the function post-Sarbanes-Oxley, the progress of tax process automation has been pretty glacial. Spreadsheets are still the dominant technology, used by 90 percent of respondents in our 2009 Business Finance corporate tax survey. About a quarter of the tax pros in that poll said that they spend more than 40 percent of their time on low-value-add activities like collecting and validating data.

How can tax directors make the case for tech investments? Where’s the sweet spot for new initiatives? What’s new in the realm of tax software? Those are some of the questions I’ll be exploring in this blog in the coming weeks. Stay tuned. ###