The question of who should own tax technology architecture generates genuine disagreement in most enterprises — not because the answer is unclear in principle but because the practical implications of any clear answer challenge existing organisational structures, budget authorities, and professional identities in ways that make consensus difficult.

The case for tax ownership is architectural: the function that is accountable for the compliance outcome should control the architecture that produces it. When the tax team owns the tax technology architecture, they can ensure that system changes are assessed for tax impact before they are deployed, that ERP configurations reflect current regulatory requirements rather than last year's, and that CTC interfaces are maintained with the same rigour as the compliance obligations they serve. The accountability and the control are aligned. Failures are visible to the people who can fix them, and the incentives to fix them are in the right place.

The case for IT ownership is also structural: the enterprise architecture is an integrated system, and fragmented ownership of its components — each function controlling its own configuration — creates coordination failures, security vulnerabilities, and technical debt that the IT function is accountable for managing across the whole estate. Tax technology is not a standalone system. It runs on the ERP, which runs on infrastructure that IT manages. When tax makes configuration decisions without IT review, the result is technical debt that IT inherits. When multiple functions own their own architectural domains, the enterprise ends up with incompatible configurations that break when the underlying system changes.

The resolution that most organisations are finding their way toward — a shared ownership model in which tax has decision authority over tax-relevant configurations while IT retains authority over the underlying infrastructure — is structurally sound but operationally complex. What it requires is a change control framework that routes tax-relevant decisions to the tax function automatically, a joint governance structure that gives tax and IT shared visibility of the change pipeline, and an escalation model that resolves conflicts before they become compliance incidents.

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Rıdvan Yiğit is the Founder & CEO of RTC Suite — the world's first Autonomous Compliance and Payment Intelligence platform, built natively on SAP BTP and operating across 80+ countries.

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