Tax Manager, Warner Bros Discovery
Entertainment company
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Entertainment company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
1001+ employees
Company mission
To take the world’s greatest possibilities and make them a reality - creating impact, inspiring imagination, and building connections.
Role
Who you are
- Qualified accountant with at least 2 years’ post qualification experience, preferably with in-house tax experience
- Strong knowledge of tax accounting, including US GAAP
- SAP experience, and experience in interrogating accounting systems preferred
- UK tax compliance and reporting experience
- Attention to detail and the ability to work to tight US quarterly reporting deadlines
- Resilience to work within a wider UK tax team following on from a merger, with an interest in improving combined processes from the 2 separate companies
- This role seems to require a strong background in tax compliance, excellent organizational skills, and the ability to work effectively with multiple systems
What the job involves
- WBD has a co-sourcing arrangement with EY, so as well as working alongside the WBD tax team, the role will involve developing relationships and working with the EY co-source tax team in the UK and India, as well as liaising with the WBD finance teams in both the UK and Poland
- Balance Sheet Reconciliations: In line with the quarterly reporting deadlines:
- Take ownership of the balance sheet reconciliation process
- Proactively liaise with EY to ensure all balance sheet reconciliations required each quarter (and possibly monthly) are prepared and signed off in the system in line with the accounting timelines
- Ensure all entity accounts with tax balances have balance sheet reconciliations prepared
- Proactively engage with EY to ensure follow up of any reconciling items and timing differences identified within 90 days of the balance sheet reconciliation date
- Take ownership with EY of the process of transferring the reconciliations from Cadency to Blackline and ensuring the reconciliations are automated
- Provision to Returns (PTR): In line with the corporation tax compliance process in EMEA countries:
- Take ownership of the PTR process, including tracking that PTRs are prepared for tax return submissions and engage with the US tax team if a PTR is not posted in the same period as a tax return is submitted
- Prepare PTRs for all entities where not prepared by EY, including analysis of US GAAP – local GAAP adjustments
- Ensure that deferred tax and payable balances post the PTR booking made in the ledgers are correct and can be validated to appropriate support and proactively liaise with EY to ensure that OTP tax software is updated for discrete accounting entries
- Cash Forecasting: In line with monthly forecasting and the payment timelines of UK and EMEA jurisdictions:
- Set up a robust cash forecasting model for Europe, following the merger
- Ownership of tax cash payments, including identifying and ensuring that all tax payments for EMEA are made by the due dates and correctly reflected in the accounting ledgers and appropriately tracked
- Additional support for Nordic cash payments to ensure CIT payments are accounted for correctly and deal with issues with VAT and payroll payments if the tax authorities account for these differently
- Set up a process to ensure EY are advised of the cash tax payments so that the OTP software system is correct each quarter
- Ad hoc assistance with the preparation of tax payments required, to include appropriate support / review EY calculations of cash payments
- Assist with claims made for UK or EMEA tax cash refunds
- Liaise with Finance and FP&A where income forecasts are required
- Software Management:
- Proactively support with the move to SAP 4 HANA
- Tax lead for working with EY to ensure OTP is up to date and agrees to WBD’s records, such as linking SAP cash tax payment postings directly to OTP
- Challenge current processes to look for efficiencies from automation, including Cadency/Blackline
- Support with the move to UK corporation tax “making tax digital”
- Other Tax Tasks: Including, but not limited to:
- Support with US GAAP reporting, calculating annual effective tax rates and ensuring accounting for any quarterly tax charges is accurately reflected in the ledgers
- Review of tax journals to ensure correct amounts are booked each quarter
- Support for EMEA tax compliance, including review of tax returns for submission
- Support with withholding tax, including ensuring correct claims made on tax returns
- Support with audit queries
- Downloading trial balances and journals from SAP
- Updating trackers
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) is an entertainment company formed from the 2022 merger of Warner Bros and Discovery. It is a leader in the creation, production, distribution, licensing, and marketing of content, with Warner Bros alone boasting a huge library – more than 100,000 hours of programming – before the companies were joined. WBD’s portfolio includes Discovery Channel, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Discovery+, HBO Max, and franchises like “Batman” and “Harry Potter”.
Both of the company’s previous businesses have operated throughout the digitisation of the media space. David Zaslav, CEO of WBD, headed Discovery during its expansion into digital media, to make it a “content company” over a “cable company”. The recent focus for Warner Bros has been on next-gen distribution efforts, expanding the availability of its content across platforms and devices to reach the modern viewer. The new company has plans to migrate to one tech stack, which will require extensive retooling, as well as exploring cost-saving automation opportunities for its operations.
Since the merger, the new giant that is Warner Bros Discovery has had a shaky start, forcing the company to wind down operations and cut back on content, which included the very public scrapping of the “Batgirl” movie. However, it now seems the company may have been ahead of the curve, as a wider trend of cutbacks has been seen from peers in the space. This early move, combined with a hyper-focus on cash generation, seeks to establish WBD as an outperformer in an industry on the downturn.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Company values
- Act as One Team: Trust each other, succeed together, and growth together
- Create What's Next: Be curious, innovate, and focus on the future
- Empower Storytelling: Put creators, consumers and partners at the center, and share extraordinary stories
- Champion Inclusion: Empower others, have courage, and pursue equity
- Dream It & Own It: Advocate the mission, ove with speed, and drive results
Company HQ
Midtown Manhattan, New York, NY
Articles
Leadership
David Zaslav
(CEO, not founder)Spent 17 years at NBCUniversal including as President of NBC Cable LLC and NBC Media LLC.
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