rs-california-sales-tax

Companies are selected for sales tax audits in a variety of different ways but the one thing I want to highlight is that the state has very limited resources in terms of which companies it chooses to audit. Sales tax audits in particular are tremendously resource consuming activities, so the state has to be very careful about which companies it selects for audit and which it doesn’t. So for example the way

Read more

Companies are selected for sales tax audits in a variety of different ways but the one thing I want to highlight is that the state has very limited resources in terms of which companies it chooses to audit. Sales tax audits in particular are tremendously resource consuming activities, so the state has to be very careful about which companies it selects for audit and which it doesn’t. So for example the way

Read more

These audits are very complex and the reason that they’re complex is they involve a very large degree of data. So for example, when you’re dealing with an income tax audit you can go through a company’s bank deposits and determine pretty quickly how much income they had or didn’t have. With a sales tax audit you’re dealing with taxable sales so if you picture a restaurant, for example. Say your average restaurant does a hundred transactions in a day over

Read more

CDTFA auditors are looking for mistakes. They’re looking at your data, they’re looking at how that data relates to each other, they’re looking at the returns that were filed and they’re looking for any errors that exist. The most common errors are discrepancies between primary source data and the sales tax returns that were filed. So for example, the sales on your federal income tax returns don’t match the sales that were filed on the sales tax returns. The auditor will find that error and figure out a way to calculate what the true percentage of sales were or at least true from the auditor’s perspective.

Read more

The biggest mistake that I see taxpayers make and the biggest area of risk that they have is the dangerous assumption made by taxpayers that because they “didn’t do anything wrong” in the sales tax audit, they don’t have anything to fear. The reality of the situation is that the auditors are looking for mistakes in the way that the taxpayers filed their sales tax returns and in the amount that they paid. The auditors are devoting a significant amount of time and energy to going through all the taxpayer’s data and verifying their taxable sales so the reality of the situation is is that even if you don’t feel like you made a mistake,

Read more

In a sales tax audit, as I’ve mentioned before, sales tax audits are very cumbersome processes. They involve a lot of documents, they involve a lot of data and they take a while to get through and our firm efficiency is one of our key factors in the work that we do. We want to make sure that the work and the value that we’re providing for clients are in a line with their cost expectations. With that said, sales tax audits are a lot of work. There’s a lot of organization and presentation and the materials. There’s a lot of tendency for disagreements in sales tax audits, particularly when they’re using statistical samples. Oftentimes those statistical samples come out wrong on the CDTFA side and we have to correct them and it gets tough when you have an auditor and you get into a conflict with that auditor and the auditor won’t back down. So with that said, sales tax law does have the ability to drive cost. One of the things that we do to mitigate cost is by sticking and trying to minimize cost in three key areas.

Read more