Indirect tax is changing faster than most businesses are ready for.
At SYNAPSE 2026, tax leaders, technologists, and operators from some of the world's largest companies—Disney, Meta, Amazon, Expedia, just to name a few—spent a day working through what modern tax compliance actually demands.
The conversations weren't abstract. They were grounded in real transformation projects, real failures, and hard-won lessons.
If you missed it, don’t worry. We captured the key takeaways from each session, which will be released as part of this series.
For now, check out our top five themes from the day that kept surfacing across every session.
1. Data: Enough 'rubbish in, rubbish out'
Every session came back to the same root cause. Bad data doesn't just create compliance headaches. It breaks reporting, slows automation, and puts businesses on the wrong side of a tax authority inquiry.
Henrique Santos from Uber put it plainly: compliance was built fast when Uber launched in LATAM, but the underlying data was still coming from legacy systems. That gap between operational speed and data quality is where problems start.
Josh Reardon from Zoom described building their entire tax infrastructure around a simple principle: validate data from the first moment a customer enters the system. "Stop doing work twice," he said. Flag the problem at the source, or spend months trying to fix it downstream.
The lesson isn't complicated. The data foundation has to come before everything else.
2. Real-time: Compliance isn't a month-end task anymore. It's always on
For decades, tax compliance ran on a periodic cycle. Gather, reconcile, report, repeat. That model is breaking down, and in markets like Brazil and Mexico, it's already gone.
Henrique Santos described the shift bluntly: "Compliance is no longer seasonal. It's not something you do the last or first week of the month. It runs all the time."
Florian from On (the running shoe company) made the operational implication clear: whatever infrastructure businesses are building today, it needs to run on a constant basis, flagging issues for finance teams in real time rather than generating a CSV of 1,000 invoices to review at month-end.
The companies that still treat compliance as a periodic task are structurally behind.
3. Automation: Automate the right things, or just make your problems faster
Automation is not a strategy on its own. It's an amplifier. Applied to clean processes, it creates real efficiency. Applied to broken ones, it creates faster, harder-to-fix failures.
Florian from On framed it well: "Don't want to automate the fun stuff. Automate the stuff that people hate doing" — finding PO numbers on invoices, matching supplier codes, revalidating TINs in bulk. The tasks that drain time and add no strategic value.
Zoom took a similarly deliberate approach. Before automating anything, they worked backwards through their process to find the first point of failure. Automation started there, not at the end of the flow where problems had already compounded.
The question to ask before any automation project: are we fixing a process, or accelerating a problem?
4. AI: Tax authorities are analyzing your data with AI. Make sure what they find doesn't surprise you
Most of the AI conversation at SYNAPSE focused on how tax teams can use AI to work faster and smarter. But there's a side of this conversation that gets less attention: tax authorities are already there.
Richard Stern from WUGTPC was clear on this: "Tax functions are staying the same. It's the way of processing it that needs to be reimagined." Authorities are using AI to process massive flows of transactional data, find mismatches, and identify discrepancies at a scale and speed that manual review never could.
Parmi from Amazon captured the risk of over-reliance on AI plainly: it can be confidently wrong, and the business is still responsible for whatever it outputs. At Amazon, that meant building ML classification with human review on top, pushing accuracy to 99.6% and still looking for ways to improve.
AI is a co-pilot, not a compliance function. The businesses that understand that distinction are ahead of the ones treating it as a shortcut.
5. Role of tax: Tax can't sit in the back office alone anymore
The transformation stories from SYNAPSE had one thing in common. None of them succeeded when tax tried to lead alone.
Nandita from Adyen, currently in the middle of a complete infrastructure rebuild, was direct about it: tax can't be alone. It has to work with finance as a whole. Roisin Nolan from Booking described mandate changes as a tsunami: sudden, disruptive, and capable of causing a complete sales shutdown until compliance is restored. That kind of risk doesn't get managed by a tax team working in isolation.
PwC's Catarina framed the cross-functional challenge as an orchestra. Each team is an instrument. When everyone plays together, the outcome works. When they don't, the result is noise. And in a digital compliance environment, noise is risk.
The tax professionals making the biggest impact right now aren't just subject matter experts. They're the ones who understand the systems their data runs through and can have a real conversation with the engineers building them.
The foundation question
Rob van der Woude opened SYNAPSE with a line that framed the whole day: "Earthquakes don't break buildings. Weak foundations do."
Every session was, in one way or another, an answer to that challenge. The businesses that are ahead aren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They're the ones that got the foundations right first: clean data, continuous processes, cross-functional teams, and a clear-eyed view of what automation is and isn't for.
The ones still relying on spreadsheets, batch processes, and siloed tax teams are sitting on a fault line. The question is how long before it moves.
