Sales and Use Tax Audit Services

The vendor is required to provide sales and use tax audit (SUTA) and state tax automated research (STAR) analysis and reporting services to ensure locality sales and use tax is accurately allocated.
- Sales and use tax audit
• Meet with city’s designated staff to review service objectives, scope, procedures, coordination of effort, work plan schedule, public relations, and logistical matters;
• Establish an appropriate liaison with the city’s coordinator and define logical checkpoints for reviewing progress:
• Review the city’s sales and use tax ordinances for included provisions, coverage, and classification definitions.
• Provide and maintain compliance with the city’s sales and use taxes by
• Determining whether the business is remitting the sales and use tax due the city to the state correctly.
• This determination by reviewing the payment data available to the city from the comptroller’s office and generating three main reports to be used for generating the leads
• Top 100 report – the top 100 sales tax revenue generating businesses in the city complete with payment history.
• Significant anomalies report – a customizable report designed to discover monthly sales tax anomalies, based on preset dollar value thresholds that may have been skipped, underreported, or misallocated to an incorrect jurisdiction
• Negative fund transfers report – a report that will track all occurrences of a business filing a refund, amended return, prepaid tax credit, state audit, or an incorrect misallocation.
• Having contractor’s sales and use tax analyst resolve all leads generated from the above 3 reports by contacting each taxpayer in order to confirm the nature of any questionable tax periods.
• Performing physical canvassing to ensure the accuracy of businesses that have nexus within the city limit.
• Providing documentation to businesses mistakenly reporting the tax to another jurisdiction to facilitate a correction of the registration information.
• Assist the business, as necessary, in filing of returns and making payments for all open tax periods.
• Documentation to the state to secure the transfer of funds to the city that was reported in error to another jurisdiction.
• Notify finance director of potentially large audit findings resulting in reimbursement to state, exceeding $2 million.
• Notification shall be provided before audit adjustment is reflected in the city’s monthly sales tax allocation.
• The city may request that contractor perform a compliance review of the taxpayer and any other additional services as needed.
- Sales tax automated research services
• Historical collections analysis – components of allocation payments by payment activity.
• Top 100 historical – historical performance of the top 100 accounts comparing current benchmark year ranking and sales tax produced with that of prior years.
• Top 100 detail – sales tax performance of the city’s top 100 sales tax accounts is shown in order of sales tax produced with the results for the most recent five quarters prominently displayed.
• The proportion of city sales tax produced is also shown by each account.
• Economic category performance – an analysis of the changes that occurred by economic category and segment with the specific businesses responsible for the significant changes delineated.
• Historical economic composition – data summarized by economic category and segment by quarters and benchmark years.
• Percentage of total sales tax generated by each category and segment is also shown to indicate trends in sales tax composition as well as performance.