Accounting
New Avalara president emphasizes customer experience, hints at e-invoicing partnership
Avalara’s new president, Ross Tennenbaum, wants to center the indirect tax solutions provider squarely on its customers.
In his new, expanded role , which was announced Tuesday, Tennenbaum will be responsible for driving company-wide improvements and ensuring the success of every Avalara customer around the globe. As president, he will oversee the majority of the company’s business operations, including Avalara AvaTax for sales and use tax calculations, Avalara Returns, Avalara Exemption Certificate Management, and Avalara Tax Research. Tennenbaum will also lead the teams responsible for Avalara’s customer and compliance operations, finance functions, India operations, and legal functions. He replaces the previous president, Amit Mathradas, who departed more than a year ago.
Kenneth A Appelbaum/Avalara, Inc.
While Tennenbaum had previously been CFO at Avalara, his involvement with the company goes back further than that, having become familiar with Avalara when, as an investment banker, he personally worked with the business to launch its IPO in 2018. After that he was brought into Avalara as executive vice president of strategic initiatives, where he oversaw building integrations between the businesses it had acquired, and eventually replaced the CFO when he retired.
His experience, he said in an interview with Accounting Today, means he knows the company inside and out, adding that he likes getting into the weeds to understand even the small details.
Tennenbaum said his immediate priority is in examining the company’s core products, “the heritage of the company,” from top to bottom in order to see where any steps along the customer process from marketing and sales to onboarding and support can be made more efficient and user-friendly, stating, “I think we can drive more growth in the business, I think we can do better by our partners and our customers and run a more profitable machine, so that is step one.”
In the longer term, he expressed a desire to center the customer experience for a more streamlined and simple application that gets as close to self-service as possible.
“We’re giving customers a better experience, the ability to self-serve … We want to make sure that customers have one front door to come into. We’re providing the best experience based on the problem. We understand the time and effort it takes to solve different kinds of problems and we have the right agents aligned to it, or AI, where we can. We’re owning those cases all the way to the end with the right solutions, so overall a better experience, more proactive support, leveraging more AI and a smarter experience,” he said.
Part of this vision is the new AI-driven support portal which is set to launch later this year, which provides a centralized space where people can get assistance with their solutions. The chatbot, he said, can field questions on the fly like how people can change their passwords. While it is initially meant to handle simple inquiries, there are already plans to bolster the AI’s capacities to handle very complex questions and give more intelligent answers,
Beyond this, Tennenbaum also pointed out Avalara’s wider ambitions to expand further into compliance solutions. He noted that while customers like their sales tax solutions, they have so many more compliance obligations to worry about, and the bigger the company the more they have as they cross multiple jurisdictions, “and heaven forbid you’re global and you’ve got obligations all over the world.” Taxes tend to lead into compliance anyway (think of the need to register with a jurisdiction once nexus is established), so it seems a natural fit for them to expand this way.
“We want to expand to help our customers with all their compliance obligations. It starts with tax, but some of these aren’t even necessarily tax-related … GDPR obligations, or HIPAA type obligations, trucks crossing state lines and having to file certain forms,” he said, though he added that, “The here and now is sales tax, [but] why can’t we be growing new product lines?”
With this in mind, he pointed to the company’s efforts to expand into e-invoicing as well, which is increasingly becoming mandated in markets like the European Union. Avalara itself
“We bought some things and built some things and it’s going well,” he said. While he demurred on the specifics, Tennenbaum said, “We have some really great partnerships in the works with some blue chip partners and some really great early customers on the e-invoicing side.”
But the core tax focus has not been forgotten either. He said that Avalara has built out its capacities on the use tax side of things, noting that it’s the other side of the coin of sales tax.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
“Every time I buy something, someone is selling something, so for every transaction there are two sides, buyer and seller,” he said, adding that focusing on the use tax side of things can make Avalara an even bigger part of transactions. “Everyone has use tax obligations. We’re saying, ‘Hey, we can help with the process for both sales and use tax.’ There’s many situations where customers are buying things where they should be exempt or the seller is charging the wrong rate of tax, either overpaying or underpaying, and that could be millions from your pocket.”
Artificial intelligence will be key to Avalara’s plans going forward. He said the company has made great strides in terms of applying AI to document classification and optical character recognition, but felt there was much more they could do. For instance, while AI currently can facilitate many processes, it relies on a relatively static set of knowledge content — what if, in the future, AI could update this content automatically as rules and regulations change? E-invoicing compliance, for example, involves dealing with multiple jurisdictions with different mandates and different timeframes and different requirements based on where one does business, some of which could change in the future and require different solutions. AI could recognize these changes and adjust itself accordingly, and perhaps even recommend new solutions that can help users in specific situations.
Tennenbaum’s vision for AI is part of his larger ambition to center the customer and make the experience as seamless as possible.
“I think our customer experience is siloed. I want to take on the mantle of a great customer experience and make it great for our customers and partners and when you apply that to AI, it helps us me more efficient because there is less throwing people at the work … . It is a win-win-win: partners are happier, customers are happier, and we get much more efficiency,” he said.
The House unanimously passed four bipartisan bills Tuesday concerning taxes and the Internal Revenue Service that were all
- H.R. 1152, the Electronic Filing and Payment Fairness Act, sponsored by Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Illinois, Suzan Delbene, D-Washington, Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, Brad Schneider, D-Illinois, Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pennsylvania and Jimmy Panetta, D-California. The bill would apply the “mailbox rule” to electronically submitted tax returns and payments to allow the IRS to record payments and documents submitted to the IRS electronically on the day the payments or documents are submitted instead of when they are received or reviewed at a later date. The AICPA believes this would offer clarity and simplification to the payment and document submission process while protecting taxpayers from undue penalties.
- H.R. 998, the Internal Revenue Service Math and Taxpayer Help Act, sponsored by Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, and Brad Schneider, D-Illinois, which would require notices describing a mathematical or clerical error to be made in plain language, and require the Treasury to provide additional procedures for requesting an abatement of a math or clerical error adjustment, including by telephone or in person, among other provisions.
- H.R. 517, the Filing Relief for Natural Disasters Act, sponsored by Rep. David Kustoff, R-Tennessee, and Judy Chu, D-California. The process of receiving tax relief from the IRS following a natural disaster typically must follow a federal disaster declaration, which can often come weeks after a state disaster declaration. The bill would provide the IRS with authority to grant tax relief once the governor of a state declares either a disaster or a state of emergency and expand the mandatory federal filing extension under Section 7508(d) of the Tax Code from 60 days to 120 days, providing taxpayers with more time to file tax returns after a disaster.
- H.R. 1491, the Disaster related Extension of Deadlines Act, sponsored by Rep. Gregory Murphy, R-North Carolina, and Jimmy Panetta, D-California, would extend the amount of time disaster victims would have to file for a tax refund or credit (i.e., the lookback period) by the amount of time afforded pursuant to a disaster relief postponement period for taxpayers affected by major disasters. This legislative solution would place taxpayers on equal footing as taxpayers not impacted by major disasters and would afford greater clarity and certainty to taxpayers and tax practitioners regarding this lookback period.
“The AICPA has long supported these proposals and will continue to work to advance comprehensive legislation that enhances IRS operations and improves the taxpayer experience,” said Melanie Lauridsen, vice president of tax policy and advocacy for the AICPA, in a statement Tuesday. “We are pleased to work closely with each of these Representatives on common-sense reforms that will benefit taxpayers, tax practitioners and tax administration and we’re encouraged by their passage in the House. We look forward to continuing to work with Congress to improve the taxpayer experience.”
The bills were also included in a recent Senate
The House also passed two other tax-related bills Tuesday that weren’t endorsed in the recent AICPA letter.
- H.R. 1155, Recovery of Stolen Checks Act, sponsored by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-New York, would require the IRS to create a process for taxpayers to request a replacement via direct deposit for a stolen paper check. If a check is determined to be stolen or lost, and not cashed, a taxpayer will receive a replacement check once the original check is cancelled, but many taxpayers are having their replacement checks stolen as well. Taxpayers who have a check stolen are then unable to request that the replacement check be sent via direct deposit. The bill would require the Treasury to establish processes and procedures under which taxpayers, who are otherwise eligible to receive an amount by paper check in replacement of a lost or stolen paper check, may elect to receive such amount by direct deposit.
- H.R. 997, National Taxpayer Advocate Enhancement Act, sponsored by Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Iowa, would prevent IRS interference with National Taxpayer Advocate personnel by granting the NTA responsibility for its attorneys. In advocating for taxpayer rights, the National Taxpayer Advocate often requires independent legal advice. But currently, the staff members hired by the National Taxpayer Advocate are accountable to internal IRS counsel, not the Taxpayer Advocate, creating a potential conflict of interest to the detriment of taxpayers. The bill would authorize the National Taxpayer Advocate to hire attorneys who report directly to her, helping establish independence from the IRS.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Missouri, applauded the bipartisan House passage of the various bills, which had been unanimously passed by the committee.
“President Trump was elected on the promise of finally making the government work better for working people,” Smith said in a statement Tuesday. “This bipartisan legislation helps fulfill that mandate and makes improvements to tax administration that will make it easier for the American people to file their taxes. Those who are rebuilding after a natural disaster particularly need help filing taxes, which is why this set of bills lightens the load for taxpayers in communities struck by a hurricane, tornado or some other disaster. With Tax Day just a few days away, we must look for common-sense, bipartisan ways to make filing taxes less of a hassle.”
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