The development of talent in the tax function

Scott Hunter, VP Global Tax & CTO, Cardinal Health: Getting the right talent, the complement of talent. Retaining that talent, developing that talent, those are all some of the top challenges that we face today. I think technology is going to be key, but at the same time they have to be people that can work across functionally in an organization. Because technology is not something that's just unique to tax, and it's something that's going to transform quite frankly the entire finance organization and infrastructure. So you need people that can work cross-functionally with their peers and finance, and also with their peers in the enterprise as a whole.

Harris Horowitz, Global Head of Tax, BlackRock: Tax people are generally thought “they should be good at technical stuff and/or compliance” and that was all they needed to be good at. They still need to be good at that, in fact they need to be superior in that to really be great tax professionals. They also have to stay current and they have to be thinking ahead and think strategically. They have to understand the business.

Barb Barton Weiszhaar, Head of Tax, HP, Inc: Some of the new folks we have coming in are just great with the data. They can do things in Excel that I will never be able to do. And so the old-school ways of spending a lot of time getting to the data, and getting it in the right format so you could do tax work, I think will be a lot better. So going forward, we have an opportunity to re-skill a lot of people within tax, and we have to be prepared to do that.