For most people, tax is something that happens in the background. For the teams responsible for getting GST right across New Zealand and every market they trade with, it’s anything but.
Governments around the world are overhauling how they collect and verify tax. Digital reporting requirements, mandatory e-invoicing, and real-time data submissions are becoming standard practice – not just in Asia-Pacific, but across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. The pace is accelerating.
The Asia-Pacific region offers clear examples. Australia and New Zealand are expanding Peppol adoption for government procurement, though business-to-business mandates remain voluntary for now. Both countries are switching to a single format – the Peppol International Invoice (PINT A-NZ) – to simplify the interchangeability of invoices. For New Zealand businesses trading internationally, the pressure is already here: across their major markets, structured digital reporting is moving from voluntary to mandatory, creating a patchwork of national requirements that differ from one another yet all move toward the same end goal.
For multinational companies, this creates a growing coordination problem. Finance and tax teams must reconcile data from multiple internal systems, interpret rules that vary significantly by country, and meet filing deadlines that don’t leave much room for error. A mistake doesn’t just mean rework, it can mean audits, penalties, and reputational risk.
Until recently, most teams have managed this through a combination of spreadsheets, manual processes, and hard-won institutional knowledge. That approach is reaching its limits, and the time cost is real. For many finance and tax teams, indirect tax compliance consumes weeks of resource every period, gathering data, chasing exceptions, and reconciling figures across systems under the pressure of immovable deadlines.
The compliance landscape is also changing shape. Real-time reporting through e-invoicing and periodic indirect tax compliance are no longer separate workflows. With agentic AI, they converge bringing together e-invoicing, reconciliations, and compliance preparation into a single, integrated automated workflow, closing the gap that has long been a source of risk and rework.
Where AI fits in
The promise of AI in compliance isn’t to replace human judgment, it’s to remove the volume of repetitive, low-value work that currently consumes most of the time. Pulling data from different systems, checking for inconsistencies, flagging mismatches before they become filing errors: these are tasks that don’t require expertise to execute, but consume the time of people who have it. The shorthand for what that looks like in practice is touchless compliance, a process that moves largely on its own, with human attention focused on review and exceptions rather than data wrangling. That capability is powered by CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters AI technology that has already surpassed one million professionals worldwide, and now brought to the complexity of global indirect tax compliance.
ONESOURCE Indirect Compliance powered by CoCounsel is built around that idea and is generally available starting July 3. It can import data from any company’s financial system, transactional records, and where available, drafts provided by tax authorities themselves. It also works to identify and resolve issues before deadlines arrive. Rather than a scramble at period-end, the goal is a steady, auditable process that reaches a review-ready state with time to spare.
“Getting new countries on board could take weeks, sometimes months. Having ONESOURCE Indirect Compliance powered by CoCounsel will help us identify changes to mappings, guide us through configuration, and streamline the whole process. These changes will genuinely be transformative for a global operation like ours.”
Kevin Escott, Executive Director, Corporate Functions Technology, JLL
Trust is the harder problem
Automating compliance is technically achievable. The harder challenge is making automation that practitioners actually trust, especially when their name is on the filing. ONESOURCE Indirect Compliance powered by CoCounsel is built to meet that standard because it incorporates Fiduciary-Grade AI™, where its outputs are transparent, verifiable, and defensible in high-stakes environments. Touchless compliance is only valuable if the trail it leaves behind is one you’d be comfortable defending.
What comes next
For New Zealand businesses trading across borders, the window for manual workarounds is closing. Building connected, auditable compliance processes now will position firms for what comes next — as structured digital reporting becomes the norm across their key markets.
Visit our website for more information on ONESOURCE Indirect Compliance powered by CoCounsel.
