What are the Risks for Taxpayers in a Sales Tax Audit? The biggest mistake that-I see the taxpayers make and the biggest area of risk that they have is the dangerous assumption made by taxpayers that because they quote-unquote 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 taxpayers 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.

The auditor may well find something if not the auditor may resort to indirect methods of testing when the auditor goes to indirect methods of testing they're using statistical samples to arrive at what the proper conclusion is the problem with statistics is if you're taking a population of transactions and you're taking a sample of that population so let's say I have a restaurant and the restaurant had three years of sales that is included in the sales tax audit depending on which days I pick for my sample it could significantly skew the results of the audit so if I pick week days, for example I'm probably going to see a lower transaction amount and I'm probably going to see more cash sales on weekends.

Where there's more larger groups and more people go out to dinner and there's larger transaction sizes I might see fewer cash transactions I might see larger average daily sales so two weekdays versus two weekends if taken as a sample and applied to that population could yield statistically very different results so even if the restaurant is diligent enough to track their daily sales if I'm using a statistical method to arrive at those sales versus what the restaurant has I could get a huge auditors tend to go after low-hanging fruit so the auditor is not going to dive in to a lot of very complicated things they're going to go after quick wins and a lot of the quick wins happen. When they go after those indirect methods of testing the auditor is going to put the burden on the taxpayer to produce documents to refute the auditors conclusion you shouldn't be guilty until proven innocent in a sales tax audit, but the reality of the situation is that's sometimes how it goes the other biggest risk for taxpayers is penalties the penalty portion of the liability could be anywhere from ten to forty percent, but the really real kicker with sales tax audits because those penalties can stack on top of each other so it's possible that if the taxpayer wasn't diligent in their records they could get a forty percent penalty and a twenty percent penalty so you can see 60 percent in penalties adds up really quickly in the context of an auto so a lot of taxpayers because they don't live in sales tax audit land don't understand the risks that are going in so it's important that you go in knowing that number one there's a huge amount of risk even if you haven't done anything wrong and number two that before the audit B even begins you're taking steps to mitigate and protect yourself as much as possible and those are the risks that you have to deal with in a sales tax.