Part of the SYNAPSE 2026 series | Shane Kent, Fonoa | Josh Reardon, Head of Tax Technology, Zoom
Most tax teams spend a significant portion of their time fixing problems that should never have gotten as far as they did. A customer record with a bad tax ID. A supplier invoice that cannot be matched. A data issue that made it through three systems before anyone noticed. By the time the problem surfaces, it has already created downstream work that is harder, slower, and more expensive to resolve than if it had been caught at the source.
The Happy Path Blueprint, one of the most operationally focused sessions at SYNAPSE 2026, Fonoa's annual conference for indirect tax professionals, tackled that dynamic directly. Shane Kent from Fonoa and Josh Reardon, Head of Tax Technology at Zoom, walked through how Zoom built a tax infrastructure designed around a single organizing principle: prevent the exception before it enters the system, rather than managing it after the fact.
Keep reading for the top three takeaways from the session.
1. Start at the beginning of the customer journey, not the end of the compliance cycle
Zoom's approach to exception prevention started with a question: where does the first problem actually enter the flow? The answer, almost always, was at the point of customer onboarding. A customer comes in with an invalid tax ID, or incomplete information, and that error travels through every downstream process until someone eventually catches it, often at the worst possible time.
"Stop doing work twice."
— Josh Reardon, Head of Tax Technology, Zoom
Zoom built TIN validation directly into the onboarding process: automated, monitored, and resolved before the customer moves further into the system. Each part of the process has a designated owner, so when something does go wrong, it can be traced and addressed without a cross-functional investigation. The goal is to make the problem visible and fixable at the moment it is smallest, not after it has compounded.
Working backwards through the process to find the first point of failure is how Zoom decided where to start automating. Not at the most complex or most visible part of the workflow, but at the earliest moment a customer touches the business.
2. Automation is only as strong as the data it runs on
"We saw automation as a mandatory requirement."
— Josh Reardon, Head of Tax Technology, Zoom
Things are predominantly automated at Zoom today, but that did not happen by automating everything at once. It happened by treating clean master data and jurisdictional alignment as non-negotiable foundations, and building automation on top of those rather than alongside them. Third parties were also treated as a genuine source of risk rather than a clean input. It is easy to assume you know your own data inside out while overlooking the fact that errors can and do originate externally.
The set-and-forget philosophy Zoom applied to TIN validation extends to revalidation as well. Customer data changes over time, and a tax ID that was valid at onboarding may not remain so. Automating bulk revalidation on a scheduled basis removes an entire category of manual work and keeps the data from drifting.
3. Clean data infrastructure has consequences that go beyond compliance
The COVID period put Zoom's infrastructure to a real test. Transaction volumes grew rapidly, which drew attention from tax authorities in several markets. Without the automated systems already in place, responding to those inquiries could have taken months. With them, the team could pull accurate, consistent data quickly and resolve questions that could otherwise have escalated into serious compliance issues.
That outcome is a direct product of the foundational work done before the pressure arrived. The infrastructure did not get built in response to the scrutiny. It was already there, and that made all the difference when it was needed.
Zoom measures the success of its automation program against four metrics: time saved, reduction in external spend, the number of third parties relied on, and bottom-line impact. Not just whether the automation works, but whether it is genuinely changing the cost and complexity of running a compliant tax operation.
Bottom line: exceptions are expensive, and most of them are preventable
The businesses spending the most time on exception management are typically the ones that let problems travel the furthest before catching them. Getting ahead of that requires a deliberate decision to treat prevention as the strategy, starting at the earliest point in the customer journey and building the monitoring, ownership, and automation needed to keep problems from compounding. The Happy Path is not a shortcut. It is the result of getting the foundations right before the volume arrives.
