Jorge Caballero, Head of Tax & Legal KPMG Mexico, and Mexico/Central America Cluster Leader, KPMG Americas Tax & Legal , explains how KPMG’s deep knowledge and understanding of the regulatory tax landscape, expertise and technology approach works in favour of their clients.

1) What do you see as the main points that differentiate KPMG Mexico from your competitors?

The multidisciplinary offering that KPMG has to the market creates a clear differentiator in the Legal landscape. Today, global, regional, and local clients are looking for a one stop service provider. We have robust legal teams with specialization in tax legal, corporate, transactions, labor, controversy, and litigation.

We complement our services with other practices such as tax advisory and planning, technology, transfer pricing, social security, among others.

Our focus in technology and ESG enables KPMG to offer top notch services to the market, such as legal transformation. In addition, the global network that KPMG has is strong and allow us to offer global and regional proposals with seamless service to the market.

2) Which practices do you see growing in the next 12 months? What are the drivers behind that?

The Controversy practice is one that has been growing at a great pace and will continue to do so in the next 12 or more months. As a result of the pandemic, tax administrations initiate a strong push to audit and review taxpayers, not only in Mexico, but in the majority of the LATAM countries.

Per an annual survey made by KPMG Mexico, Perspectivas de la Alta Dirección, more than 50% of the taxpayers are or have been in an audit process during the last year. Having an external advisor to navigate together these processes becomes more important than ever.

In addition, I strongly believe that technology and ESG will become more and more relevant in the Mexican legal market in the following months.

3) What's the main change you've made in the firm that will benefit clients?

We have created a strong collaboration culture, in which we put in first place our clients and markets, with strong multidisciplinary teams. In addition, we have made important investments in the practices of controversy, international taxation, litigation, labor, transactions to have the best talent available for our clients.

4) Is technology changing the way you interact with your clients, and the services you can provide them?

Absolutely, not only in the way that we deliver our services, but in the engaging process and reacting more efficiently to the needs of our clients.

In the services, Tax Technology and Transformation practices have been leading the way in terms of growth and demand from the market. Tax authorities in Mexico were the first adopters of technology for the digital invoicing and are now leveraging that technology to perform their audits in a faster and efficient way. Taxpayers and advisors can’t be behind the curve embracing the technology to manager their tax risk and compliance processes.

5) Can you give us a practical example of how you have helped a client to add value to their business?

One of our clients was having challenges in and audit due to the quantity of information and documentation requested by the tax authorities. The full tax staff was involved in the audit, leaving not enough time to attend the day to day tax operations of the company.

We pulled together our tax controversy and technology teams to facilitate the gathering of all documents requested, freeing up the tax staff of our client to focus on their business instead. With the use of technology, we were able to save a lot of time and to comply with the deadlines established in the legal procedure.

During the audit and review of the different proofs, the tax authorities were inquiring not only from a tax perspective, but there were some effects related to transfer pricing and trade & customs. We were able to set up a multidisciplinary team with the different expertise required and were able to help our client close the audit, distorting the observations made by the authorities. In the meantime, our client was able to focus their team in their tax risk management and compliance activities.

6) Are clients looking for stability and strategic direction from their law firms - where do you see the firm in three years’ time?

Yes, they are looking for a business partner in their law firms, a partner that understands their operations and help them think more strategic, whilst mitigating their tax risk.

We see our firm continue investing in having the best legal talent and building on the different specialties required by the market to be able to render multidisciplinary services, leveraging the technology including the generative AI in the benefit of our clients and markets.