We all know that administrative processes will be fully automated in the future and continue their march towards real time. Still far too many of us continue to sit on our hands - perhaps not hoping that this inevitable
change is a bad dream - but not having the energy or time needed to get out of daily chores.
All this despite the whole process being so important both for badly needed improvements in corporate productivity, public sector costs, EU Single market progress, fighting grey economy, x-sector innovation etc.
Individual enterprises and public sectors could already today take their fate in their own hands by just boldly declaring that the future is here and papers or PDFs are to be replaced by structured e-documents (starting from the all-important
e-invoice or no invoice policy).
But when it comes to the next layers - Data Extraction to automate reporting, cash flow estimates and accounting - we need to come together - in xEU public-private partnerships. To get x-EU interoperability, open standardized interfaces, rulebooks etc in
place. All parties need to see the big need and stop driving selfish interests and still often pure populism.
It should be noted that DG Taxud at the EU-commission for its part has delivered on its promise regarding jointly standardising VAT reporting - so that it will be possible to move faster and X-EU to fully automated e-invoice based reporting (present cost
to enterprises easily 35bn€/year - most of which can move the bottomline and save costs considerably in the public sector).
So - we know where we are heading - why not get there faster?