Achieving unrealized tax savings through our expertise in sales tax recovery
A tailored approach that maximizes refund opportunities and minimizes future overpayment risks. With our expertise, we add significant value by optimizing your financial resources and ensuring compliance with tax regulations.
The Sales Tax Refund Review
Process
Define Goals
Our practice utilizes an exclusive and consistent reverse audit process that equips our project teams with a flexible framework, sophisticated process tools, and ample support resources, ensuring a high-quality, efficient, and timely reverse audit experience. The reverse audit process of our practice commences by establishing a collaborative partnership with you to clearly define project goals. This includes specifying the states and issues within the scope, establishing effective communication lines, and identifying key members from both our practice and your organization.
Diagnostic Review
Subsequently, we conduct a comprehensive diagnostic review of your company's primary tax-related processes and functions. This review helps us gain a deep understanding of your systems and processes related to sales and use tax payments. Leveraging our proprietary data extraction queries, which cover most major ERP systems, we work closely with your IT professionals to deploy these queries and extract only the necessary data for the engagement. The extracted data is securely transferred to our practice via a file transfer protocol (SFTP), stored securely, and reviewed on our protected servers, ensuring the consistent integrity of the data.
Platform & Technology
Within our Sales Tax IQ platform, several tabs facilitate the progression of the reverse audit review process. Through a simple point-and-click interface, our team can apply filters to isolate transactions of interest. Once the filters are selected, our team proceeds to the Review tab, which provides additional details about the selected transactions, including machine learning predictions from our practice, and offers the ability to enter comments regarding the exempt nature of transactions and suggested tax adjustments. The Project tab delivers an overview of the tax amount within the dataset and insights into the review's progress.
Knowledge Transfer
At the conclusion of the review, all findings will be summarized within the Project Scoping visuals. If you choose to pursue refunds, our practice will compile all the necessary forms and documentation required by the taxing jurisdiction to file refund claims. We will then collaborate with the tax authorities and vendors to expedite the recovery of potential refunds in a timely and efficient manner. Once the refunds are recovered, we will work together with you to identify and implement process improvements, ensuring mitigation of potential future overpayments.
Co-sourced approach with compliance services
Direct Pay Compliance
KEA serves as your embedded Direct Pay Permit compliance team, handling monthly filings and reviewing each period’s purchases against the exemptions specific to your operation. It’s the institutional depth of an outside firm applied at the transaction level, every month. Taxability errors get corrected when they happen so savings don’t wait on a refund cycle. Because audit defense is included in every standard engagement at no additional cost, the program isn’t just recovering money, it’s reducing risk at the same time.
Indirect Tax
Technology
Streamline Your Indirect Tax Operations with Cutting-Edge Technology Solutions
Data Extraction
For data extraction, we typically come on-site either manually to retrieve paper invoices, or can work with electronic invoices via hard drives. We have also developed proprietary and can work with our internal team to write scripts and code specifically tailored to extract the necessary data directly from a company’s ERP system. These extraction queries are designed to minimize the burden on the company’s IT and Tax Department resources by allowing deployment during off hours and targeting only the required data for the reverse audit.
Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) forms a critical component of our approach. ML involves employing artificial intelligence and statistical analysis to enable computers to “learn” and assist in decision making. In the context of a reverse audit, we train the software to evaluate a previously reviewed data set, allowing it to determine the taxability of each transaction in a new data set by leveraging common data elements between the two sets. By incorporating ML techniques, we significantly reduce the risk of overlooking any potential opportunities.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that employs software to replicate processes, eliminating the need for manual labor. One notable application of RPA is our internal team building and automating the retrieval of electronic invoice images. By simulating user actions such as data entry and point-and-click, RPA can seamlessly retrieve the required electronic invoice images from a company’s imaging system. These RPA processes can be scheduled to run during off hours, when system demand is lower, resulting in substantial time and resource savings.
Energy practice by the numbers.
assets under management in our energy practice
leases in Texas appealed by KEA's energy property tax practice yearly
professionals working at KEA
What our sales tax clients say about KE Andrews
Texas Oil & Gas Operator (200 wells)
KE Andrews has done a tremendous job with our recent sales tax audit. Whether it’s compiling and organizing the information or dealing with the state or status updates, they made the entire process quite painless. We are very happy with their service (and our refund!) and would recommend KE Andrews to others.
CFO
Energen
The KEA team are proven energy experts providing sales tax review, valuation and negotiation services to Energen for over 15 years. They work independently throughout our organization obtaining critical data with minimal impact to our staff. We've seen significant tax recoveries and savings, and we highly value our partnership with KEA.
VP Tax
Vernon E. Faulconer
KE Andrews is a proven value to our company. Our Texas Use Tax audit liability was reduced to only a few thousand dollars, after a large high-profile company was unable to help us. KEA provided training during the audit, and questions from our staff continue to be welcomed. Responses are quick, concise and with reference to the proper state tax law. We rely on KEA!
Controller
