I recently interviewed Jason Rinsky, SVP of corporate taxation with DRS Technologies, a Parsippany, New Jersey-based company that supplies integrated products, services, and support to military forces and intelligence agencies worldwide. Rinsky steered a major strategic tax tech initiative at the defense giant starting in 2006.

Cummings: What did you bring to DRS Technologies from your Big Four days?

Rinsky: You always have a bunch of ideas and thoughts in terms of how you’d like to see a tax department run, and how well you can utilize tax technology in an innovative fashion and add efficiencies to the process. But one of the frustrations that consultants typically face is that a lot of times you come up with ideas, but it’s very difficult to convince a company to go forth and implement them.

So when the opportunity came up to join the staff at DRS, it excited me because it was a large company, but it had an atmosphere and a culture in place that was always striving for efficiencies and looking to become best-in-class. It was a great opportunity to come in and bring a lot of things that I’d always thought about when I was with the Big Four firm.

I joined the company in 2006; the implementation began the same year. But behind it there was a whole philosophical approach in terms of, How do we use information and data gathering in an innovative fashion? How do we revamp our old mind-set on how we conduct a tax function? How do we add value to the organization as a whole by using that information in a proactive fashion?

Cummings: What were the first challenges?

Rinsky: What I saw was that there were a number of duplicative processes that were historically utilized in the data gathering process, and so as a result the folks at the ground level — the operational and finance people within their respective subsidiary companies — were spending so much time and effort in responding to tax information requests. And those requests in many respects were duplicative to information that they were already providing to the operations team and the finance team.

As a result, it was challenging to, number one, motivate people to complete those requests in a quality fashion; number two, do so in a timely fashion; and number three, be able to convince them to allow us into their world and be part of their team — to start assisting them with other non-income tax matters that are more value-add to the company, specifically with transactional taxes, sales and use, property, payroll, and so on.

Given the way that DRS, as well as many other large organizations, historically has run their tax departments, it’s difficult to be able to convince the providers of the information to treat you differently than as a reporting body. But as you engage in what I’d call the business development model or the sales model of convincing them that you’re going to do things differently — that you’re going to make their lives easier through, in our case, the use of technology — you can help them to see that you’re trying to make a difference. You can show them that you’re going to make their processes easier, that you’re respectful of their time. And they, in turn, will be respectful of what you’re trying to do, and they’ll help you to make it a success.

The big cultural shift is breaking down the barriers that exist between a tax department and the rest of the organization so that the company embraces tax as a viable, proactive, and value-adding department.

To be continued … ###