Meet the Experts
2026 is a watershed moment — e-invoicing mandates are no longer a future concern, they're a present business reality.
Tax is now
Master data quality is the new compliance currency — if your data isn't right at the point of transaction, your invoice won't be accepted.
For years, tax compliance operated on the periphery of business operations as a periodic obligation managed at the end of the process. That model is over. In this episode, Paula Pignatti Smith, Managing Director for Indirect Tax Technology at KPMG, and Christian Van der Valk, General Manager for Indirect Tax Technology at Sovos, explain why 2026 represents a genuine inflection point for indirect tax compliance. From France, Belgium, and Poland adopting e-invoicing mandates to Brazil’s sweeping NF-e reform, where the tax authority now validates tax liability at the line-item level on every single invoice, the regulatory landscape is shifting from periodic reporting to real-time, transaction-level oversight. As Paula puts it, organizations can no longer fix data errors in the return; master data must be right at the point of transaction, or the invoice may simply never be accepted.
Van der Valk frames the broader arc with striking clarity: tax compliance is becoming “compliance as code,” woven into the fabric of every business process rather than applied as a layer on top. Van der Valk describes how tax is now present in virtually every step of the financial and physical supply chain making it visible in real time to tax authorities around the world. For SAP organizations, this means the traditional tax operating model is no longer viable. Pignatti Smith and Van der Valk walk through what the new model demands: integrated IT, finance, and tax functions working in concert; investment in data quality as a compliance prerequisite; and a strategic partner capable of managing an ever-growing, ever-changing body of global regulation. This episode delivers the big-picture perspective every enterprise tax and finance leader needs heading into the next wave.
