So a dual determination happens when you have a situation with a business that either accrues payroll tax liability or sales tax liability. What happens in that case is when you have a payroll tax or sales tax liability with the business, the state or the IRS can hold the officers of the company responsible personally if they did not pay those taxes. So there’s certain taxes that we refer to as trust fund taxes and those are monies that are held in trust for the benefit of somebody else so a common example of this has to do with payroll taxes. When you don’t pay payroll taxes there’s a portion of those payroll taxes that are the employer’s responsibility but there’s also a portion which are the employees responsibility. So for the employees portion of those taxes, the government can hold you responsible for that. What a dual determination really hinges on is who is responsible for the non-payment of taxes, whether they had knowledge or whether they were aware of the fact that taxes weren’t getting paid, and whether they could have done something to pay those taxes. So generally speaking if you are aware of a liability and you chose to pay other creditors that warrant, the government is going to hold you liable. So the dual determination process is a very strategic one because when you have a situation where you have multiple officers
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How Do Sales Tax Audits Work in California?
So here’s how the sausage is made with respect to a sales tax audits. The state decides to audit you, California sends you a letter that says “hey you’re being audited” and then you will respond to that letter and that kicks off the audit process. So from a practical perspective what happens is the government will usually issue an audit request for three years of information or in the case of a sales tax audit, they’re doing it over twelve quarters. So from the outset of a sales tax audit, you need to understand what your risk is. You ideally want to go through the twelve quarters, maybe not in full at the beginning, but at least have a general understanding to know where the pitfalls are in the audit and then depending on where your pitfalls are, that’s going to determine what the plan is with the auditor.
What Is a Payroll Tax Audit?
This video will explain in brief about the payroll tax audit. Watch this video to get more information on this topic.
Why Is It Important to Get an Attorney Involved at the Beginning of a Sales Tax Audit?
What Is It Important to Get an Attorney Involved at the Beginning of a Sales Tax Audit?
What Is a Sales Tax Audit?
A sales tax audit is kind of what it sounds like. The sales tax audit is the government coming in and checking to make sure that sales tax was paid properly. The biggest problem that we see in sales tax audits is that when you’re auditing a business’s sales, it’s not very reliable. Meaning yes, you can go through a business’s records over three years and audit every single transaction, but the problem with a lot of businesses, particularly lot of retail businesses, is cash and so even if you were to go through and audit everything, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the records are going to align with the way that the auditor thinks that they should. So you can have differences of opinion where the auditor can claim that there’s unreported cash sales or that there should have been additional tax charged and a variety of different issues and the problem with sales tax audits again is the size of them. You’re dealing with all of these transactions, you’re dealing with three years of individual transactions day in and day out.
What Is the Direct Method of Testing in a Sales Tax Audit?
Brotman Law video has all the information you need to know to test during the direct method of the Sales tax audit.
What Is an Indirect Method of Testing in a Sales Tax Audit?
In a prior video we talked about the direct method of testing. The direct method of testing involves testing actual source documents, lining up and comparing them when you have a breakdown in the direct method. Then sales tax auditors will resort to what they call indirect methods. Indirect methods of testing is a fancy way of saying we’re going to play guessing games with statistics. So one of the indirect methods of testing is audit path sales. They look at current sales and they’ll do statistical comparisons between past sales and current sales. So one of the easiest ones they do is they do an observation test. They’ll send an auditor in a business for a couple of days to look at the sales that are being performed, whether the employees are ringing everything up correctly, whether they’re charging tax and then the auditor will sit there and literally record every single transaction and they’ll compare that against the POS system reports to see if there are any discrepancies. That’s called an observation test so if there is an error within that test, then they’ll do certain things based on
Tax Issues for Multi-State Businesses
Hi I’m Sam Brockman I am the founder and principal attorney at Brotman law here in San Diego. Today We’re going to be covering tax issues for multi-state businesses. I want to give you a little bit of a background on my background in order to better do some context to this presentation, so I am a tax controversy attorney here in San Diego which in plain English means I represent businesses and audits payroll tax sales tax and income tax and I help those who owe more money to the government than they can pay, so our firm does a variety of services but mostly we focus in on examinations and we focus in on collections work and in helping companies with compliance issues, so that they avoid those two issues increasingly a larger percentage of our business is with multi-state companies who are trying to stay out of trouble traditionally. We see a very large influx of businesses outside of California who tend to step into California tax issues, so I’m going to speak mostly from my cuts in the context of dealing with California tax issues but this applies to a variety of states California is one of the more aggressive states in pursuing businesses that are located outside of its borders for tax revenue California kind of smartened up to the fact that it can go after businesses and individuals that may have contact with the state of California, but who actually don’t reside in California and do don’t have voting power in California. So California has increased its base of operations and actually has offices in.
Are Tax Debt Relief Companies Legitimate?
To know if tax debt relief companies are genuine or legitimate. Brotman Law has given all the information you need.
How Does IRS Tax Debt Affect Your Passport and Your Ability to Travel or Live Overseas?
The IRS can report you to the State Department and the State Department can essentially revoke your passport.