So statistics, just to give you a brief lesson, are about the integrity of the data that you have. So what you’re doing with statistics is you’re taking a representative population or an entire data set, let’s call it a business’s sales over a three-year period, and then you’re taking a representative sample, you’re trying to create a fair and accurate sample of that population. So if we were to look at the business of sales over a three-year period, the goal would be how do we take a smaller subset of that that we feel is going to be fair and accurate? So here’s where CDTFA audits often get into it as we have what we call a data file. So CDTFA and your sales tax auditors have very limited resources. When they do an observation test, when they do a mark of test and when they’re using the indirect methods of testing, they’re only going to do it for a certain period of time usually two to three days max. And so obviously the challenge is if you’re going to take a three day sample or a two day sample, how can that possibly be representative of over a thousand days over the course of a three-year period. Three days, a thousand days, it’s not very representative because you can have a variety of things that would go into those three days that could heavily tip the scales in one way or the other. Hopefully in the favor of your taxpayer anyway.
What Is an Observation Test?
The context of a sales audit an observation test is kind of what it sounds like you’re observing something.