How U.S. Energy Scaled to 44 Tax Jurisdictions

The challenge

Over the past six decades, U.S. Energy has become one of the fastest-growing petroleum suppliers in the region and is recognized today as a trusted and diverse wholesale fuel distributor. Based out of Appleton, WI, U.S. Energy’s focus had been primarily in the Midwest region.

New opportunities to increase presence and revenues by expanding to other regions of the United States have made U.S. Energy a national presence in the storage and distribution of petroleum products.

This rapid growth found U.S. Energy expanding its operations from 12 jurisdictions to 44 jurisdictions.

In order to meet the tax preparation and filing needs of the business, U.S. Energy needed a way to quickly set up filing processes for new jurisdictions while improving efficiencies in order to meet the organization’s increased statutory requirements.

The solution

To meet their objective, U.S. Energy chose our excise tax compliance software to automate their manual filing process. This provided a foundation to quickly and easily build a filing framework to rapidly deploy tax processing for the new jurisdictions in which U.S. Energy was entering.

Built by our team of industry experts with a combined 60+ years of experience developing and implementing motor fuel excise tax software solutions, IGEN is designed to meet a tax team’s needs today and well into the future. Our powerful workflow processing makes it easy to add new jurisdictions and returns when needed. Not only is our compliance software powerful, it’s also extremely user-friendly, allowing tax teams to add and update filing rules themselves as needed.

The results

The indirect tax team at U.S. Energy enjoys higher levels of employee morale due to the reduction of tedious “busy work” and long hours completing the manual process.

The tax managers and analysts have more time to focus on value-added activities such as process improvement and tax strategies.

The validation functionality within our excise tax software has allowed the tax department to identify potential issues within the filing period that may have otherwise been found in an audit.

User-friendly tools allow the tax team to maintain data preparation rules and filing criteria without requiring IT-level training.

We provide the latest tax rates, paper returns, and electronic file formats.

All tax data is stored in one system allowing for easier research into past filings and improved analysis of tax data over time.

U.S. Energy can import data into the application from seven different source systems and align transactions into the same filing process. In fact, when U.S. Energy moved to a new back-office system, they could import data from the legacy system and the new system as different functional areas came online during the system go-live.

The tax department has full visibility of all transactions from the moment they are imported into the software until they are entered on the returns or electronic files.

IGEN has allowed the U.S. Energy indirect tax team to:

• Automate their transaction collection and preparation process, reducing processing time from two days down to 30 minutes.
• Build out and go live with 12 jurisdictions in one month.
• Participate in the setup of new jurisdictions, thereby saving significantly on the cost of implementation.
• Control the tax process and reduce dependence on other departments.
• Electronically file in all jurisdictions that allow it, not only those that require it.
• Realize efficiencies that increased filing efficiencies by 50% or more.
• Reduce costs by delivering additional returns without requiring additional head count.