Just received a notice? We’ll take it from here. Already three months into an audit that’s gone sideways? We’ll step in mid-stream. We represent you directly, or advise you from behind if you’d rather keep the relationship in-house.
The goal is the same either way: walk away with the smallest defensible liability.
Auditors are professional, generally fair, and doing a job with a target. They are also expert in a process you’ll go through once. Cooperating fully and answering everything asked is not the same as defending yourself.
Most audits test a sample period and extrapolate across years. An unrepresentative month — a big one-off sale, a bad quarter — becomes the basis for the entire assessment. Challenging the sample is often worth more than challenging any single transaction.
An audit opened on one tax year, or one tax type, can widen if what you produce invites it. Volunteering records outside the request is the most common unforced error we see.
An exempt sale you can’t document is a taxable sale. Certificates can often still be collected during the audit — but only if someone starts immediately.
Most businesses prepare for questions about tax they should have collected. A large share of assessments are actually use tax on what the business bought — equipment, software, supplies — where no vendor charged tax and nobody self-assessed it.
A protest window is typically 30 to 90 days from the assessment and it does not pause while you look for help. Once it lapses, a wrong number becomes a final, collectible one.
If you overpaid tax in the same period — and businesses routinely do — that can offset the assessment. Auditors are not required to look for it. We do.
Some clients want us to take the whole thing. Others have a good relationship with the auditor and want to keep it — they just need to know which battles are worth fighting. Both work.
We file the power of attorney and the auditor deals with us. Your team stops fielding questions and goes back to work.
You keep the relationship with the auditor. We tell you what to produce, what to push back on, and what a reasonable outcome looks like.
Audit defense isn’t one argument. It’s a sequence of them — scope, method, documentation, statute, offsets, penalty — and each one moves the number. An assessment that starts at seven figures rarely finishes there when someone works through all six.
We’ve reduced initial assessments by an average of 58%, and we resolve in about four and a half months against an industry average of nine or more. Faster matters: interest accrues the whole time.
Set the number the state has put in front of you. The left column is what happens if you accept it and let the process run long. The right applies our average reduction and our average resolution time.
Illustrative. Applies our historical average 58% reduction and 4.5-month resolution against a 9-month industry average, with interest at 8% annually on the outstanding balance. Every audit turns on its own facts and no outcome is guaranteed.
An audit tells you exactly where your compliance was weak. That’s worth acting on while it’s fresh.
Missing certificates are the single largest audit-risk category. We collect, validate, and maintain them so it can’t happen twice.
The same review that finds what you owe often finds tax you paid and shouldn’t have. We file to get it back.
Most clients who’ve been through one audit decide they’d rather not run compliance in-house again.
An audit is a negotiation conducted in writing by people who do it constantly against people who do it once. We put someone on your side of that table who has done it hundreds of times.
We work autonomously and keep the disruption to your team down to the documents we genuinely need.
Almost certainly not. We step into audits at every stage — fieldwork, preliminary assessment, protest. The only point we can’t help is after the appeal window has closed and the assessment is final.
No. Auditors work with representatives constantly and it usually makes the audit faster — requests get answered properly the first time. If you’d rather they didn’t know, take the consultative route and we’ll stay behind you.
Many excellent CPAs see a handful of sales tax audits in a career. Sampling methodology, home-rule jurisdictions, and multistate taxability are their own discipline. We’re often brought in alongside a client’s CPA rather than instead of them.
Scoped per engagement, based on the size of the assessment and where the audit stands. On a first call we’ll tell you honestly whether the likely reduction justifies the fee — sometimes it doesn’t, and we’ll say so.
A first call costs nothing and takes twenty minutes. If there’s a deadline running, that’s the most useful twenty minutes available to you today.
