For Immediate
Release
Contact: Kathy Grannis or Ellen Davis (202) 783-7971
grannisk@nrf.com or
davise@nrf.com
ARTS Announces International XML Standard for Tax Management
Washington, April
22, 2008 – Retailer costs associated with calculation, collection, reporting and
remission of local and national transaction taxes are estimated at several
billion dollars annually and multinational retailers face staggering complexity
at the point of sale. The Association for Retail Technology Standards, a
division of the National Retail Federation, is helping retailers navigate these
challenges with the new Transaction Tax Schema.
ARTS today announced the release of this new standard that will link information
from transaction tax providers to a retailer’s POS system. The benefits will be
harmonization of the download and publication of transaction tax rules to a
retailer’s POS and/or tax calculation systems, improved accuracy of tax
liability calculations and streamlined communication between the POS and tax
calculation systems.
“This standard will help retailers by reducing the cost and difficulty
associated with tax management,” said Richard Mader, Executive Director of ARTS.
“We specifically targeted this work to greatly or even eliminate the effort
associated with sales tax audits and we strongly believe the work team
succeeded.”
The new standard was developed by a diverse ARTS work team which included
retailers such as BJ’s Wholesale Club, El Cortes Inglés and Reebok, and
suppliers such as ADP Taxware, ARS eCommerce, Clicks & Mortar, Micros Retail,
NSB, Oracle, Retail Anywhere and Vertex.
“Retailers have long been challenged with meeting the requirements of national,
state and local tax authorities,” said Scott Gamel, chair of the Transaction Tax
work team and Sr. Associate, Tax Compliance at ADP Taxware. “An ARTS standard
that connects retailers’ POS and ERP systems to transaction tax software through
XML messaging will go a long way toward making their lives easier.”
ARTS Board Member and work team contributor Perry Kramer, VP, Sales Operations,
Corporate and Logistics Solutions at BJ’s Wholesale Club, agreed. “Multiple
compliance burdens, placed upon large transaction tax remitters like retailers,
will be simplified by this robust standard,” he said. “Additionally, the
standard will dramatically enhance retailers’ ability to quickly and accurately
react to the ever-changing complexity of overlapping tax jurisdictions and of
cross jurisdictional sale and return transactions.”
The standard is specified in XML, the data language of the internet. Anyone
involved in the retail business that operates in multiple tax jurisdictions will
benefit from this specification. Transaction Tax offers seamless integration
with other ARTS standards such as POSlog and Price and as well as other global
standards such as GS1.
The Association for Retail Technology Standards is an international membership
organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards.
Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the
retail industry. ARTS has four standards: The Standard Relational Data Model,
UnifiedPOS, ARTS XML and Standard Requests for Proposal. Membership is open to
all members of the international technology community- retailers from all
industry segments, application developers and hardware companies.
www.nrf-arts.org.
The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association,
with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution
including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, independent
stores, chain restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores as well as the
industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an
industry with more than 1.6 million U.S. retail companies, more than 25 million
employees - about one in five American workers - and 2007 sales of $4.5
trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents over 100 state,
national and international retail associations.
www.nrf.com
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