Click here for Part I

Establishing a collaborative, inclusive standard for corporate tax guidance

Jeff Westphal is currently the CEO of Vertex. Founded in 1978, Vertex is a leading provider of corporate tax software and tax services. The company is known for its unique organizational philosophy, which prizes integrity, diversity, excellence, and personal growth. With offices located around the world, Vertex currently employs over 850 professionals and serves over 10,000 clients, including global industry leaders such as Starbucks, Honda Motor Company, SAP, and Verizon Wireless. Jeff has been with the company since 1988. In 2001, the same year he was named CEO, Vertex was named "The Best Place to Work in Pennsylvania.” In addition to his work at Vertex, Jeff serves on the boards of multiple area nonprofits. He and his wife are also the founders of Kyle's Treehouse, a web-based resource for families raising children with autism spectrum disorder.

EDWIN WARFIELD: You were an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist a few years back. Tell us about your leadership style and how you earned that honor.

JEFF WESTPHAL: I think Ernst & Young recognized Vertex and myself as an Entrepreneur of the Year finalist because of the unique culture that we have, in addition to our growth and corporate success. You know, it’s one thing to grow from $5 million when I joined the business to in excess of $200 million today, but it’s another thing to do it and maintain 5% turnover for 20 years and to never rely on third party investment or debt. And that’s because we put the emphasis first and foremost on our people and we realized that the strength of their relationships is the coin of the realm.

It’s the ability of experts to work well together to create complex solutions for clients. That’s where all the value is born—to be able to see the meaning and impact of that work. When we focus on that first, we produce breakthrough innovation that our clients reward us in terms of their loyalty, the highest prices in the marketplace, high market share—and the growth follows. But it all starts with whether we’re supporting high-trust, effective, collaborative relationships between highly expert individuals. I think EY saw that and called us out for it.

Q. Does Vertex have a typical client profile? What unifies your clients?

A. Our clients are the crème de la crème of the US corporate community. We have 80% share of the US marketplace for enterprise transaction tax processing solutions. When you pay the sales tax at the register—how does that get calculated? How do they know the right tax to charge? Where does that money go? How does it back to the right jurisdiction when you’re talking about the scope of complexity of a major multinational and repeat that in every country they do business in? Most of them are doing business in 150 countries around the world. It’s an enormously complex task and we’ve developed sophisticated engines and processes to be able to help them do it.

These are the corporations that create the things that make the infrastructure of our lives: the cars we drive, the food we eat, the homes we live in, the tanks that protect us. It’s vital that they know exactly what their tax obligations are, and that they know that they’re compliant.

There isn’t a corporation on the face of the planet that has too many tax people. There’s a real, actual pressure because there aren’t enough people in corporate tax who know how to deal with all this complexity and yet you have major corporations. Starbucks is one of them—and they’ve given me permission to talk about this—where they use spreadsheets to do complex global tax accounting because there haven’t been sophisticated tools. Our new solution, which is really kind of our holy grail we’ve been working on for the last decade—Vertex Enterprise—actually enables sophisticated tax functions like Starbucks to take manual spreadsheet based processes that would have 30 manual steps and all the risk of error that goes along with that, and automate that down into a push button five-step system that runs automatically. It’s a dramatic step forward in reliability, risk mitigation, accuracy, and insight for the corporate tax function. It’s been borne of 30-plus years of experience from that little sales tax rate database that we started with. So, it’s an exciting place that we’re in now.

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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