Platform: Mobile

Background

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requires foreign or U.S. individuals or entities who hold U.S. equities to be tax certified. This way, the appropriate tax rates are going to be applied to these parties.

Having to deal with many U.S. clients, these workflows are built into Shareworks web applications early. However, the feature doesn't exist in the mobile app (both iOS and Android). In addition, as part of the Morgan Stanley acquisition, we needed to add tax certification functionality to the app.

The users

The user

In this project, the users are the employees or shareholders at a U.S company. Therefore, the support for entities was out of scope for this project.

The problems we're trying to solve

Many users use the app exclusively (no access to a desktop or laptop). Without certifying their tax statuses, they risk getting more taxes withheld and eventually getting into trouble with the IRS.

A design problem we were trying to solve was to figure out how to help users quickly navigate these complex tax forms. Some of them either have never done it before or have questions that they can't get an answer to quickly.

Business, product, and user goals

1. Business: make sure the shareholders are tax compliance and reduce support tickets on this subject
2. Product: add support for tax certification on the mobile app so that it's on par with the web
3. User: be able to be tax certified to avoid backup withholding or paying more taxes than they should be

Design

I worked closely with the product manager and the engineering team to understand the requirements for this project. There was also a lot of discussion with the stakeholders and studying the IRS website to understand the tax certification processes.