Vermont has started a new program named “Know What You Owe” to encourage businesses to self-audit with special incentives for businesses that owe use tax to Vermont. We believe that all businesses should regularly audit themselves so they don’t get caught with huge penalties, especially since so many states offer incentive programs like Vermont’s. Vermont’s new program runs until May 1, 2014, so it’s time to get started on self-auditing to give your business plenty of time to take advantage of the benefits offered by self-auditing.
Businesses that participate in the program can look forward to these benefits: All penalties waived on unreported sales tax 50% of all interest owed waived. A limited “look back” period of only 3 years. This program is only for use tax but doing a self-audit of your sales tax is always a good idea. It’s better to catch mistakes on your own than to have an auditor find them later. So how do businesses go about doing a self-audit? By going through all of your records to make sure they’re correct and accounted for on returns to the state. For sales tax, this can be a huge task but automating it using software that can check the data for mistakes makes it easier.
Part of our suite of software products is DisclosureLINK, a software program designed to review and verify all your sales tax filing information to see where your business could get caught for underreporting. It’s simple to use.: Upload the files you want to work with within minutes. You can even upload multiple files at once to cover a lot of ground quickly. Tell DisclosureLINK to verify the data and let it do the work. DisclosureLINK scours all your sales tax data to check for discrepancies, and errors in addresses, and then compares it to how much you paid to the tax jurisdiction. Take steps to resolve the errors by using resources directly in DisclosureLINK.
Once you see where your discrepancies are, you’ll know what documents you need. DisclosureLINK can give you all the documentation you need for voluntarily filing with the appropriate taxing jurisdiction. The benefit of DisclosureLINK is that it’s so easy to set up and use, we can use your business’s data in a demo. You’ll be able to not only see how DisclosureLINK works but tell whether it’s a good investment for your company based on mistakes in one past return. Contact us today for a free demo with your own data.
