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The year is almost over.

The beginning of the new year brings with it a flurry of tax returns to be prepared and filed by many companies, including corporate tax returns for companies whose fiscal year ends in December, the preparation of statutory reports, depreciable asset tax returns, and year-end adjustments for some companies.

The company's tax staff is responsible for handling these tax affairs of the company.

The company must train its tax staff to be able to handle these tasks. However, it may take a lot of effort to train such a tax person in the company.

There are reasons specific to taxation that make it difficult to train tax professionals.

The first of these is that there are many kind of taxes that are relevant to a company.

The first familiar ones are corporate, business, and inhabitant taxes. You must file a tax return within 2 months (or 3 months if the deadline has been extended) after the end of the fiscal year.

Next is consumption tax. Businesses with taxable sales more than 10 million yen are required to file a tax return.

Depreciable assets tax is probably the next most popular tax. If you own fixed assets over a certain amount, you are required to file a tax return. In addition, if you have an office or place of business of a certain size in a so-called government-designated city, you are subject to business office tax. In addition, there are a wide variety of other taxes related to companies, such as registration and license tax and revenue stamp.

In order to file and process these tax returns, the tax staff needs to be knowledgeable about many of these taxes. However, it takes many years of training and experience to acquire this knowledge.

The second reason is that taxation is highly seasonal and not busy all year round.

Operations such as corporate and business taxes are concentrated during the fiscal year end. In addition, the deadline of depreciable asset tax and statutory tax documents are at the end of January, Other tax items will need to be processed accordingly when they come up.

Thus, tax works are not always present.

Even if you are able to train an in-house tax professional, it is difficult to keep that person engaged solely in taxation.

In many cases, the tax staff may also be responsible for accounting, monthly closing, management accounting, and corporate finance.

Tax staff has to acquire other knowledge as well as tax knowledge.

Tax professionals require a vast amount of knowledge and experience.

Therefore, it is not an easy task to train many employees who can possess such tax knowledge and experience.

Therefore, the number of employees who can perform tax work is limited, and depending on a particular employee.

This is fine as long as the employee is working well, but if the employee becomes ill or retires, it is not easy to find an employee who can take over the tax work.

Therefore, it may be a big issue for a company to train in-house tax staff with that much knowledge and experience.

In our next issue, we will share with you how to prevent depending on a particular employee for tax work.