Sales tax recovery (refund reviews)

Peisner Johnson founded its entire practice on state and local tax, we have in turn, developed extensive experience and knowledge regarding sales tax.

We built our firm on the foundation of helping companies find and recover overpaid sales tax on their purchases – to the tune of millions and millions of dollars.

We have a very straightforward phased approach to our recovery projects:

We begin by analyzing your business. That usually (but not always) means our coming to your place of business to meet with you and reviewing your actual purchase records. We will meet with you briefly to learn about your company and any special circumstances or expectations you have during the engagement. We don’t intend for this meeting to be long, since we’ve promised to take very little of your time. Don’t worry, we’ll meet with you again to go over all of our findings and answer all of your questions. In the beginning, we usually just need a little time to understand your accounting system and how you store your records.

After our meeting, we get to work doing what we do best – finding refunds. What we review during discovery depends largely on what your business does. We’ve conducted hundreds of reviews for virtually every industry in every state, so we have a wealth of ideas to use on your behalf. Although we may not know exactly if or where you have opportunities, we are confident we will find refunds if they are available. Our main objective here is to be productive and minimize interruption to your staff.

At the end of our initial review of your records, we will meet with you briefly to update you on our progress. At this point we may have a hunch of what opportunities are available, but until our data is researched and compiled, we won’t know exactly. Again, we don’t intend this meeting to be very long either. We pride ourselves in our ability to work autonomously while it’s business as usual for you. This is a very different experience than a sales tax audit conducted by the State.

The Data Compilation phase is where the work really begins for us. It usually involves research to verify our findings, and data entry.

At the conclusion of this work we will send you all our findings and meet with you (usually virtually) to discuss them. This is when we will answer any questions you have and discuss the next steps for the recovery of any overpayments we find.

Once we get the okay from you, the recovery process can begin. Actually recovering the refunds for you can be accomplished in several different ways. In some cases, we submit a refund request to the State. Sometimes we make requests from vendors. Or, if possible, we apply the credits on future returns or against audits. Regardless of whether we do one or all of those, we handle all of the refund requests on your behalf and keep you informed of our progress. You are always completely in control of the process.

One thing that sets us apart from other firms is our desire to advise you on any exposure areas uncovered during our engagement and/or modifications you can make in your processes to avoid overpayments going forward. We see this engagement as the beginning of our partnership with you to ensure your company’s tax compliance, and we provide on-going assistance with other important needs you might have like nexus consultation, sales tax return preparation, audit defense and more.

Every state has a statute of limitations (typically 3-4 years) that prevents the department of revenue from going back past that date in seeking unpaid tax. This protects you from liabilities going back many years. However, this can be a double-edged sword. The statute also limits how far back you can request refunds on tax overpayments. Every month your company waits looking for refunds, you may be losing money. So the sooner we can get started, the better.