SWOT for Tax by Kelley Lear

SWOT for TAX

Embark on a Mission.

Kelley LearManaging Director

W

TO

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SWOT ANALYSIS WORKSHOP

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats in Your Tax Lifecycle

Plan Your Department’s Attack.

SWOT Overview

Discussion On Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats

After your SWOT

What’s Ahead?

What is SWOT?

SWOT is an extremely useful tool for understanding, as well as decision-making for any number of business situations. SWOT is an acronym for Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

What is SWOT?

SWOT is a “process” and/or analysis tool that helps your team analyze a piece of your tax lifecycle (or the entire process).

It opens team member thought processes and encourages brainstorming without fear.

SWOT brings good ideas to the table and lifts areas for change, as well as opportunities to excel.

How can SWOT help you?

A SWOT analysis generates information that is helpful in matching an organization’s goals, programs and capacities to the social and business environment in which it operates.

INTERNAL FACTORSWhat you as a tax professional can control

Strengths – What does your team do well? List the strengths of your lifecycle (or slice of the process) and staff. What distinct advantages does your methodology or process offer?

Weaknesses – Where can your team improve? List the weaknesses of your process and staff. What are the challenges/risks that you may have as a result? Are there manual tasks and room for error?

Four Key Elements: SWOT

Strengths

Identify what creates value. A strength is something that makes your process valuable, what setsit apart from other processes.

Divide the strengths into categories. They can be listed as assets, resources and specialized skills that your process or staff have available.

Assess the specialized skills within your staff.

SWOT: Strengths

Weaknesses

Analyze weak points of your process from an internal perspective. Where can you improve the data quality or acquire the expertise that creates value?

Identify weak points from a manual process, data integrity or knowledge point of view. These may be the reasons why you have a process that has not had much review or analysis.

Be sure to include things related to staff, missing or incorrect data, lacking skills, tax and technology resources.

SWOT: Weaknesses

EXTERNAL FACTORSCurrently outside your realm or what you control

Opportunities – What can your team do better? What opportunities exist in the environment or other departments in the organization which will propel your team onward and upward? Identify them by their “time frames”.

Threats – What obstacles do we face? Classify them by their seriousness or risks and probability of occurrence.

Four Key Elements: SWOT

Opportunities

Identify external factors that may effect your programs in a positive way. These could be IT initiatives, Finance Initiatives, Tax Incentive Programs, Regulatory Reform, Staff Training, etc.

SWOT: Opportunities

Identify realistic concepts that may stimulate growth or efficiencies in your process.

Identify new technologies to improve processes.

SWOT analyses offer helpful perspective at any

stage of a plan.

You might use it to:

• Explore possibilities for new ways to

communicate with Finance and Accounting

to get the data you need.

• Make decisions about the process and

solutions with respect to FIN 48 and

provision.

• Lift up manual processes associated with

apportionment.

• Identify manual processes and risks

associated with fixed asset management

data and processes.

How can SWOT Help You?

Identify if any of the weaknesses already listed might threaten your program.

Divide the threats into categories, such as “current” or “future”.

SWOT: Threats

Threats

Identify external obstacles that may negatively impact the programs, such as regulatory reform.

You might use SWOT to: • Identify best practice procedures and

create checklists.• Lift up the need for using a tax portal for

collaboration and workflow in tax.• Identify the need to improve your audit

through appeals processes.• Simply to determine where change is

possible…

How Can SWOT Help You?

Knowledge is indeed power, and knowing both the positives and negatives of your process puts you and your team in a more powerful position for positive action.

While a SWOT analysis is not in itself “action”, it can serve as a support team to help you:

• Identify the issues or problems you intend to change.

• Set or reaffirm goals. • Create an action plan!!

Post SWOT

Image credits:

Boetter

Pink Sherbet Photography

Keng Susumpow

96dpi

Kyz

David Paul Ohmer

Thank You!

Thank You.

We hope you enjoyed SWOT for Tax. For information about Red Moon Solutions and the tax solutions you want, contact us at 1.800.224.1260.

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