For the last four years, you spent nights and weekends hunkered down in your room surfing the 'Net. They can write Web pages, Java apps and XML code like nobody else. You scrape together enough money to finance a couple of sleepless months building an incredibly cool e-commerce site. Finally, the big day arrives. You're scrambling, but you manage to keep up.
Business is booming, an IPO is on the horizon, and life is very, very good.
Fast forward twelve months. There's a knock at the door. We'd like to talk to you about tax compliance. We're glad to see your business succeeding so well, but even though your company runs on the Web, it looks to us like you may not have fully understood the complexities of tax jurisdiction, collection, reporting and remittance. First, tax compliance as a business requirement is too often an afterthought in the development of internal business systems.