Integrating Tax within your ESG Agenda
Businesses are increasingly adopting and articulating tax principles, aligned to their broader Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) agenda. This is a critical element in providing them with their ‘social licence’ to operate which is ever more important to shareholders, investors and wider communities.
Tax is a key ESG metric: external stakeholders are interested in your business’s tax behaviours and expect to see evidence of how your business is responsible and transparent in terms of aggressive tax strategies, and the level of economic contribution the business makes to society.
Businesses are publishing wider tax statements, their tax strategies, tax control frameworks and signing up to transparency standards (including the OECD/G20 Principles of Corporate Governance, the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) for comprehensive tax disclosure and the International Business Council (IBC) of the World Economic Forum – Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics).
Finance and tax executives must be able to have informed conversations with stakeholders about tax and wider economic contributions. This becomes vital in the M&A space where an investor’s ESG program will include an evaluation of the investor’s and investee entities’ tax control framework. This is an essential part of the Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI).
We help businesses demonstrate and substantiate how they are responsible and transparent in their approach to tax matters and tax payments. Greater transparency and tax governance mean providing relevant and meaningful data and insights about your tax strategy and tax contributions across all jurisdictions in which you operate.
We can help you with:
- Designing and implementing a tax strategy and policy that is responsible and transparent
- Design, implement and embed a tax policy and/or digital tax governance
- Design and implement a tax control framework
- Assistance with drafting or reviewing your tax statements, reporting or disclosure for your integrated reports
- Gap analysis of your tax (ESG) metrics and designing implementation plans