Businesses overpay sales and use tax constantly — on exempt purchases a vendor taxed anyway, on manufacturing equipment that qualified for relief nobody claimed, on tax charged in a jurisdiction that had no right to it. We find it, document it, and file to get it back.
Under-collect and a state eventually comes looking. Over-pay and nothing happens at all — no notice, no flag, no correction. The money simply stays where it landed.
Which means the only way it comes back is if someone goes looking, and the only person with an incentive to look is you.
There is a deadline. Refund claims sit inside a statute of limitations — commonly three to four years, depending on the state. Every month you wait, the oldest recoverable quarter drops off the back.
None of these are exotic. They’re the ordinary consequences of a vendor applying a default, a tax engine applying a rule too broadly, or an exemption that required someone to know it existed.
Manufacturing equipment, research and development, agricultural inputs, pollution control, data center investment. Most states offer them, most require you to assert them, and most businesses that qualify never do.
A supplier charges tax because their system charges tax. If you bought for resale, or bought something exempt in that state, you paid something you never owed — usually across years of invoices.
A city rate applied to an address outside the city, or a district tax charged where the district doesn’t reach. Small per transaction, large across a few hundred thousand of them.
If your automation is mapped to tax something that’s exempt where you sell it, you’ve been charging customers tax they didn’t owe and remitting it. That’s recoverable — and it’s also class-action exposure until you fix it.
An invoice where the vendor already charged tax, self-assessed again by an accrual process that didn’t check. Common, invisible, and straightforward to document once found.
Separately stated shipping is exempt in some states and not others. Installation labor, repair labor, and maintenance contracts all have their own rules. Vendors tend to tax all of it, everywhere.
Finding the overpayment is the easier half. Getting a state to actually pay a refund is a documented, argued claim with its own procedure, its own deadlines, and its own reviewer — and states are considerably less enthusiastic about writing cheques than cashing them.
We file it, support it, and answer the questions that come back. Where the overpayment went to a vendor rather than a state, we pursue it through the vendor instead.
Tick what applies. Each one is a pattern we’ve recovered against before — the more that are true, the more likely a review pays for itself.
Tick anything that applies. Most businesses recognise at least two or three of these once they think about the invoices rather than the returns.
Indicative only. A real answer needs the invoices — but a first call will tell you quickly whether it’s worth pulling them.
A refund without a fix just resets the clock on the same overpayment.
If your own engine was over-collecting, correcting the configuration is what stops the next three years of it.
Vendors tax exempt purchases because they don’t have your certificate. We give it to them and keep it current.
If you’re under audit, overpayments in the same period can offset the assessment. Nobody on the other side will raise it.
Recovery work is invoice-level review — thousands of lines, looking for tax paid on things that were never taxable. It is unglamorous and it is where the money is.
We work it on contingency, so the only engagements we take are the ones we believe are worth your time.
It’s a fair concern and worth being direct about. A claim does get reviewed, and a reviewer looking at your records may notice other things. That’s exactly why we scope the whole picture first — if there’s exposure sitting next to the refund, you want to know before you file, not after. Sometimes the right advice is to fix the exposure first.
Typically three to four years, varying by state and measured from when the tax was paid. The practical consequence is that waiting costs you the oldest quarter every quarter.
Then the claim usually runs through the vendor, who refunds you and reclaims it from the state. Some states allow a direct claim in certain circumstances. We work out which route applies and pursue it.
Scoped per engagement once we’ve seen the likely size of the opportunity. If a first look suggests there isn’t enough there to justify the work, we’ll tell you that rather than bill you to find out.
“The Sales Tax People was able to simplify the sales tax process for me and ended up saving us a lot of money and work. Look forward to working together in the future.”
A first conversation costs nothing and tells you whether there’s a recovery worth pursuing. If there isn’t, we’ll say so plainly.
