By Brian Gordon, Raleigh News & Observer (TNS)
With offices overlooking right field of Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the tax compliance software provider Avalara intends to add 100 workers to its downtown location in Durham, NC, by the end of the year.
“Tax compliance is a high growth industry,” Avalara’s chief revenue officer, Kimberly Deobald, said in an interview Wednesday. “We want to scoop up the talent leaving other companies that are in decline.”
Founded in 2004, the Seattle-based Avalara arrived in the Triangle in 2013 after it acquired the Raleigh firm Tax Technology Services. The company went public five years later, trading on the stock market until 2022 when it was acquired by the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners.
Today, Avalara says it has around 4,800 workers globally, about 10% of whom are based in the Diamond View I building at Durham’s American Tobacco Campus. Next to Seattle, the Bull City has the company’s second largest U.S. office. Avalara is hiring locally in all departments, Deobald said, including legal, sales and customer account management—though she noted the Triangle office has comparatively fewer engineers.
Policy experts on the left and right acknowledge the U.S. tax systems is getting increasingly complicated, as state and local governments find new (and politically tolerable) ways to raise revenue. On its website, Avalara highlights there are more than 13,000 sales and use tax jurisdictions across the country. Each can have its own rules, like in Wake County, where prepared food and beverages get charged an additional 1%.
“You could probably spend a week here and hear people talk about all the complexities of taxes,” Avalara public relations manager Tommy Morgan said.
In 2018, the Supreme Court decided state governments could begin to tax online retailers, ushering in more tax laws and a greater interest in software like Avalara’s, which enables businesses to automate much of their tax accounting and collection. Deobald said the rise of global e-commerce, accelerated during the pandemic, has furthered this demand.
Today, Avalara’s client list includes Zillow, Groupon and Comcast. Over the past decade, its Triangle workforce has quadrupled from roughly 115 employees in the mid-2010s. And soon, the company says even more will be able to watch live Durham Bulls games from work.
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©2024 Raleigh News & Observer. Visit newsobserver.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC.
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Tags: Software, Taxes, Technology
