Overview:

Faced with a high volume of global T&E business expenses, Michelin faced the burdens that come with manual transaction processing and lack of visibility over their VAT recovery potential. Implementing Blue dot’s VATBox solution gave Michelin one global, digitalised and fully transparent process, enabling them to recoup $3.3 million in domestic and foreign VAT, and giving them the confidence to scale compliant tax digitalisation throughout all their entities.

The Company

Michelin is the second-largest tire manufacturer in the world with entities and factories all over the globe. Headquartered in France, the company is also known for its coveted Red Guide awards for restaurants that are highly reputed and respected in the world of catering.

The Challenges: No Visibility & Heavy Burden Increase VAT Compliance Risks

As a global company, Michelin regularly faces a high volume of employee-generated T&E expenses for business travel. But without a unified digitalised process in place to validate these transactions for VAT reclaim, Michelin’s tax team did not have clear and accurate visibility into their VAT recovery potential. Existing processes were painstaking and time-consuming, requiring constant manual cross-checking between invoices, receipts, and expense reports. The sheer number of T&E transactions presented an overwhelming burden on their internal resources. Just as problematic, manual processes were unable to identify or complete missing data and were prone to errors, risking compliance and resulting in 42% of claims being disqualified. Keeping up with constantly changing tax laws and rates for every country and entity they operate made compliant VAT submissions even more complex.

We have a small team working in the vat recovery. Our main challenge was that we didnt have any visibility into our process or about the quality of the documents that we had and we had no visibility into the level of our compliance. It’s impossible to manage big amounts of data without the right technology.Jose-Manuel Pedron-Garcia Global Tax Compliance Process Leader at Michelin

Michelin needed a digitalised, fully compliant and audit-ready solution that would allow them to optimise their recovery using as few internal resources as possible. They also sought to recover foreign VAT from invoices generated over the last two years.

• No clear visibility into global T&E VAT recovery data
• Risk and exposure due to inadequate quality of T&E invoices
• No internal resources available to take on a project of this siz