Success Story - Altagas Service (US)

Challenge

Provision:

After Altagas Service acquired a new gas company with two major subsidiaries, we were tasked with combining provision and compliance from three different companies. Disparate systems made it challenging to consistently train and update team members during the quarterly and annual close.

The provision needed to be reviewed and reported at the Altagas Service (US) level, which presented the following issues:

• Merging two Excel^® files together to report the consolidated tax disclosures
• Providing the information by segment and/or utility vs non-utility, which required excess hours from the tax team
• Addressing these challenges with our tax teams split between Michigan and Washington, D.C.

Compliance:

When completing the tax returns, one team recalculated the tax adjustments for inclusion in a separate income tax compliance software, and manually entered them. After the return was completed:

• True-up was entered into two different provision modules to ensure the accumulated deferred income tax balances were accurate
• Journal entries for the provision-to-return true-ups for all companies were completed in Excel and entered into the general ledger accounting system; a process that required a 30-day commitment from the entire tax department.

Solution

The CSC Corptax^® team was stellar in helping us meet the goal of implementing CSC Corptax^® Provision and Compliance in less than 6 months.

Results

We actively use Corptax to generate provisions and post to the general ledger system. A single system ensures we touch data just once. Now, the team:

• Reports with detailed information by segment and/or utility vs non-utility companies using very specific “utility” accounting
• Reports tax information based on the software’s industry-specific FERC accounting
• Determines consolidated results without the need to merge Excel files
• Generates current taxes payable, current tax expense, accumulated deferred income taxes, and deferred tax expense within minutes of uploading monthly GL balances

We anticipate the process will be shortened by at least 25% – 40% this year from improvements, given that all the data is in one software.