Meet the Experts
Treating tax as a configuration project during S/4HANA migration is the single most expensive mistake an organization can make.
Roughly 70% of tax issues trace back to bad master data — clean data is the foundation of clean compliance.
It's never too late to bring tax to the table, even if your S/4HANA migration is already in flight.
When SAP organizations begin their S/4HANA journey, the focus is typically on technical migration, data models, and system architecture. Tax, more often than not, gets treated as a downstream configuration task, a decision that creates what Tim Roden and Talal Antar call “architectural debt.” In this episode, Roden, Solution Architect for Tax Technology at Sovos, and Antar, Managing Director of Tax Technology Operations at DMA (Ducharme, McMillan & Associates), explain why tax must be treated as a first-class stakeholder in every SAP S/4HANA transformation. This is not just because of regulatory pressure, but because tax touches every major transaction flow in SAP, from sales and procurement to intercompany and cross-border inventory. With 90% of SAP Insider survey respondents reporting they plan to bring tax in early, the awareness is growing, but the execution still frequently falls short.
The episode provides practical guidance for organizations at every stage of migration. For those already in flight, Antar offers a clear framework: consult your tax team now, identify historical audit exposure and tax leakage, and use that data to build the business case for integration before go-live. Roden addresses the longer horizon, making the case that with regulatory mandates accelerating globally and e-invoicing rapidly becoming the norm, the only viable path forward is a scalable, external tax solution that can absorb new jurisdictions without custom coding or multi-vendor complexity. The key takeaway: keep the core clean, bring tax to the table early, and choose a partner built to stay current as the regulatory landscape continues to evolve.
