Case study

Royal Dutch Shell: Tax compliance in hours not months

How does a company calculate, in less than a day, taxes due on shares being given to 11,000 employees, across 80 jurisdictions?

Share plans are a critical part of Shell’s remuneration strategy, and it operates a global performance share plan (PSP), through which employees receive a number of shares based on the company’s performance. The PSP has over 11,000 participants (rising to 17,000 in 2016) from over 80 countries, spanning Shell’s entire operations. Shell had always focused on compliant tax processing, but the manually intensive process was costly to operate, took months to complete and provided minimal transparency to participants.

So we worked with Shell and its share plan administrator to streamline the entire process, with the key aims of reducing the administrative burden, improving the employee experience and, of course, ensuring compliance with all laws and regulations. Leaning heavily on technology to deliver our global tax expertise, we simplified and automated the tax-calculation process, improved transparency and helped ensure compliance with tax laws across multiple jurisdictions. Using our Incentives web service, Shell’s recent PSP pay-out was completed within four hours, with over 99 percent of calculations completed without the need for any manual intervention.

“Deloitte’s technology lets us manage the bulk vesting of awards, requiring several thousand calculations across 80+ jurisdictions — including tax equalisation when required. All participants can see their calculation online on the same day the transaction is submitted.”

Pam Roffe, share plan manager at Shell

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