The latest tax law information at your fingertips

TaxAudit.com provides tax audit defense, tax help, tax representation and tax return review services to millions of clients nationwide including individual taxpayers, tax professionals and small businesses. To help clients, TaxAudit.com needs to keep current with changes in tax law and the most recent interpretations of the federal and tax courts.

Matthew Estes, director of strategy at TaxAudit.com, says, “In the past, we sent out hundreds of e-mails updating teams, and it was difficult to ensure everyone was reading them. Those who did read the mail downloaded attached files to their local or network drives, increasing our network and storage requirements and support costs by orders of magnitude.”

With critical client and tax information shared by e-mail, version control was also an issue for the company’s critical tax and procedure documents. “Because people downloaded files to their local drives, it was difficult to keep everyone up to date with the most recent changes,” says Estes. “Our success depends on staying current, so we needed a centralized way to store and update critical documents for our teams.”

TaxAudit.com is a distributed organization with nearly 200 employees and three locations. “We have groups spread over three offices and a number of home offices,” says Estes. “We needed to get distributed teams working together in ways that add value for our members.”

To overcome its internal communications and collaboration challenges, TaxAudit.com implemented Interact’s intelligent intranet technology. “We reviewed several intranet platforms, but Interact was the one that best suited our needs. It had all the features we needed as standard, making it fast and easy to deploy, and the search and version control features are excellent and very easy to use,” Estes adds.

With a small team of content managers uploading and updating content on the intranet, distributed team members now have a single point of access to all the information they need. “People can get what they need quickly, rather than searching all over the place,” says Estes. “We save so much time with Interact, and that translates directly into a more efficient, productive business and a better experience for our clients.”

The fact that all documents are stored centrally ensures that everyone in the business can keep up to date with the latest changes. “When you send out information by e-mail, there are always some people who don’t get it—new employees for example. Now, with Interact, everyone has the information they need to work effectively,” Estes says. “We now have more than 80 percent daily engagement on the intranet and counting.”

According to Interact, TaxAudit.com has realized the following benefits:

• fast searches for critical documents,
• improved version control,
• fewer e-mails and reduced storage and management requirements,
• improved teamwork and knowledge sharing across the business, and
• improved employee engagement and internal communications.

(Image courtesy of ShutterStock.com)