Florida Audit: Total Amateur Hour
So the Flordia sales tax auditor presented her preliminary findings. She believed that I had under-reported revenues and sales taxes by half! Hundreds of thousands of dollars over three years. I told her it was absolutely impossible. No way we were off by that much.
And we were not. It turns out that the FL sales tax report we fill out has five categories of revenue one must report in. One is general sales. Another is lodging. We have revenue in both and report on both lines. She had apparently only pulled the data from her system from the general sales line. Total amateur hour. Incredible. (Several years ago there would have been a good "Bush League" pun but since the governor's office has turned over the opportunity is lost).
The other finding is that we had about 8-10 expense invoices (out of hundreds I had to pull yesterday by hand, ugghh) without any sales tax broken out on the invoice. This may mean the vendor did not charge sales tax, or that the vendor just did not break it out. Of course, she takes the former position, without any evidence.
This expense invoice audit is an irritating result of the "use tax" rules that states are imposing to try to make one pay tax on out of state sales. But these were not out of state vendors, they were all Florida vendors. I told her that if she thought they were not charging sales tax, to go audit them. She said I had to pay.
This is absurd. If I am found to have under-collected taxes from my customers, then I have to pay. She is not going to go to all my campground customers and charge them back use tax. But when I am the customer and the vendor potentially undercharges me, I have to pay as the customer? There is no consistent rule to explain why this makes sense, except for the general rule of government that they will take money from whomever they can whenever they think they can get away with it.
