Does Your Business Need Use Tax Consulting?
Use tax is a complicated subject. If your business buys goods and does not remit sales tax at the time of purchase, your business is often responsible for paying properly calculated use tax to the state government. However, not every product purchased sans sales tax requires a use tax payment, often established on a state-by-state basis.
Ensure Use Tax Compliance (& Avoid Overcompliance)
In the midst of use tax uncertainty, companies regularly err on the side of caution and self-assess use tax on exempt items! Unfortunately, overcompliance leads to unnecessary overpayment. In the world of business, every dollar matters. Use tax consulting relieves the burden of being overtaxed, liberating your capital to invest and thrive.
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Recover UseTax Refunds
Overcompliance leads to overspending. Fearful of an audit, many businesses overpay taxes on exempt goods. Unfortunately, we consistently see a lack of expertise result in significant capital losses. We are in the business of recovering overpayments and preventing overspending from occurring again. To achieve these goals, we specialize in contingency-based use tax recovery reviews, also known as reverse audits.
What Are Use Tax Recovery Reviews (Reverse Audits)?
A use tax recovery review is a detailed analysis of business operations to uncover use tax refunds. In other words, we identify and return money due you from overcompliance errors. Every reverse use tax audit we perform is distinct, because every business is different, and exemptions vary from state to state.
Contingency-Based Sales Tax Reviews
As a service-oriented use tax consulting firm, we conduct our reverse audits on a contingency basis. Why? First and foremost, contingency-based reviews benefit our clients – there is no risk in engaging with our consultants to see if we can be of assistance. Second, we are confident in our ability to deliver savings to our clients, often exceeding customers’ expectations.
Use Tax Consulting Services that Deliver Tangible Savings
Why let the state keep your money?
Align your tax and accounting systems with current tax laws
Sales and use tax law is constantly changing. Some come in the form of law changes, while others are a change interpretation of an existing law. When was the last time your tax and accounting systems were updated to capture such changes?
Maximize the benefit of the exemptions for which you qualify
State legislators, other taxpayers, the courts and even state taxing authorities have carved out tax exemptions intended to benefit your business. Take full advantage of them!
Recover prior overpayments
Each state has defined an open look-back period to allow taxpayers to identify and request refunds for taxes paid in error. If you don't act within this open statute of limitations, then the state gets to keep your tax dollars whether they were billed correctly or not.
Eliminate future overpayments
Based on your specific operations, we develop and share a custom taxability matrix that classifies common categories of purchases into taxable and non-taxable status to help you leverage these improvements going forward.
Train and educate your in-house staff
Whether the determination of taxability of purchases within your organization rests in the hands of purchasing, accounts payable or accounting, use our findings and taxability matrices to train and educate. Want help? We'll train your staff for you.
Develop ongoing, trusted advisor relationship
We view these recovery reviews as being similar to a doctor's physical exam - an event that should happen on a recurring basis to ensure good health. We want to build an ongoing relationship with you and become your go-to solution for external sales and use tax assistance.
Use Tax vs Sales Tax
Sales tax and use tax are a common source of confusion. Which one relates to your business? Do you need to worry about both? Are they the same thing? Although sales tax and use tax are complementary (and sometimes collected at the same time), they are different.
Sales Tax
Sales Tax is remitted to the state’s Department of Revenue by a registered service person or retailer. Generally, sales tax applies to the end user of a service or product and is charged to the purchaser at the point of sale. Sales tax is often added to the total sales price.
Use Tax
Use Tax is submitted to the Department of Revenue by the purchaser if sales tax was not collected when the merchandise was sold. For example, many items purchased exempt from sales tax require use tax to be calculated and paid after use.
Find the sales tax exemptions for your state
We’ve compiled state-specific research regarding the sales and use tax exemptions available in each state. You’ll also find helpful links to sales and use tax related content for each state revenue agency.
Ready to get started? Speak with an expert!
