Sales and Use Tax Support for New York CPAs

Audit Management and Assessment Reduction
Internal Compliance Reviews
Technical Support
Compliance System Development and Training

Sales Tax Plus, Inc. is a sales and use tax specialty consulting firm. We regularly work with accountants to improve the quality of their services to their clients in the sales and use tax area.

Sales Tax Plus can work with you to improve your client's New York State sales and use tax compliance program and minimize state audit assessments.

As full times sales tax professionals with the depth of a national network of sales and use tax experts, Sales Tax Plus can assist you:

• train your client's personnel,
• help your client obtain maximum refunds from past overpayments of tax,
• lower your client's tax expense, and
• reduce your client's sales and use tax administrative costs.

Services for Companies Under Audit

Sales Tax Plus offers a full range of services for CPAs with clients undergoing an audit by the Department of Taxation.

1. Overcompliance Review

A "reverse audit" can identify items of tax overpayment and will ensure that all available credits and exemptions are taken by your client. Any overcompliance during the audit period can be used to offset the Department's proposed assessment for underpayment of tax due, thereby reducing the net tax assessment, interest and penalties.

2. Audit Administration and Inquiry Response

When Department auditors challenge your client on a specific item, Sales Tax Plus personnel can provide authoritative support to prevent the issue from turning into a hard-to-reverse assessment. Prompt, reliable answers ensure better audit results.

3. Proposed Assessment Negotiation

As a Department auditor identifies undercompliance, Sales Tax Plus can assist you in performing a review of the auditor's workpapers and negotiation of difficult audit issues. This assistance can be provided at any stage of the audit process, giving you added leverage during pre-assessment negotiations.

4. Post-Assessment Representation

Sales Tax Plus professionals have represented taxpayers in sales tax administrative hearings or litigation in New York and over 20 other states. We maintain relationships with legal counsel across the country who are expert and well-respected in the sales and use tax field in their respective jurisdictions.

Internal Compliance Review

Even the best corporate tax administration programs can benefit from an internal compliance review. Sales Tax Plus will bring to you and your clients our 35 years of combined experience working with New York manufacturers on sales and use tax issues. An internal compliance review can lead to refunds or credits from any tax overpayments and will ensure that your client pays only the sales tax that is actually due.

A confidential internal compliance assessment can identify opportunities for your client to achieve substantial cost savings by modifying recordkeeping procedures, changing taxability decisions or modifying the characterization of certain equipment or services to produce a more accurate sales and use tax return and reduce tax paid. It will also identify trouble spots in the event of a Department of Taxation audit and suggest ways to reduce potential Department audit liability.

Utilities Utilization Review

Utility services (including electricity and gas) used in production and/or manufacturing processes are exempt from New York sales tax. Using an approved survey process, Sales Tax Plus can calculate an accurate exemption percentage for your manufacturing client's utilities consumption. This could result in substantial tax savings and lower your client's utilities bills.

Sales Tax Plus can work with your client's in-house electrical engineers or production personnel to determine the appropriate utility exemption percentage, or we can use our own electrical consultants to do the required survey of power consumption in your client's plant.

Our personnel have experience in the detailed examination of production equipment power utilization and can assist with the preparation of client records in the format required by state tax authorities to obtain the utility exemption.

Technical Support

Sales Tax Plus personnel are available at all times to support accountants' technical needs. Our technical support services provide 24-hour turnaround response to requests for taxability interpretations. Our technical support responses will reflect current case law, government advisory opinions and other sources of interpretative authority. We can prepare research memoranda for CPAs to use as support for their own advice to clients or deliver our comments directly to the CPAs client.

Compliance Systems Development, Personnel Training and Client Manuals

Sales Tax Plus personnel have analyzed the compliance programs of scores of New York manufacturers, ranging in size from $1 million to over $10 billion in gross sales. We can work with you directly or with your client's personnel who are responsible for sales and use tax administration to improve existing procedures or design a new compliance program that best fits your client's financial systems while improving sales tax compliance.

Sales Tax Plus professionals are the authors of the 468 page, New York State Sales and Use Tax Handbook for Manufacturers, advertised in the CPA Journal as the only book written specifically on sales tax compliance for New York manufacturers. Sales Tax Plus can also design a customized sales tax compliance manual for your client, based on its purchasing, manufacturing methods and customer base.

Cost Effectiveness and Client Relationships

Our commitment to providing quality client service at reasonable cost ensures that work is completed on time and costs are kept under control. When working with an outside accounting firm, our fees can be structured on the basis of hourly or per diem rates, a contingency arrangement or a hybrid formula best suiting your needs and your client's requirements.

Our personnel place an emphasis on teamwork and operating as a fully integrated sales and use tax specialty service. We complement the outside accounting firm, not compete with it. We operate either side-by-side with the outside accountant, or "behind the scenes" to support your existing client relationship. Either way, we provide depth in technical and procedural support that is unmatched in Upstate New York.