I was audited a few years ago after being flagged for a large business expense, like this woman. Despite only that single expense being in question, the auditor asked for complete sales and expense records, which took literally reams of paper to print out, then organize and bind into folders for me to ship (I was out of state at the time of the audit and they wouldn't move it to a local auditor). It took days to click through pages and pages of history at PayPal to provide a separate printed receipt for over 1,000 separate sales, just for starters. I simply used the QuickBooks export to do my accounting, no need to keep each individual receipt on paper.
In the end all those reams of paper added up to exactly what I reported on my taxes, to the penny, and the "investigation" was closed with no changes to my taxes.
I hope every year that the audit means they'll be less likely to audit me again since I always have the same big single deductions each year (suppliers mostly).
As is typical of the usually shoddy reporting by the WSJ, the article completely fails to explain or even briefly describe the court's ruling itself, despite spending nearly 4 paragraphs describing how the ruling could be monumentally helpful for others.
(And no, providing the disposition of the case is not the same thing as providing a disposition of the legal ruling by the court.)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] threadI was audited a few years ago after being flagged for a large business expense, like this woman. Despite only that single expense being in question, the auditor asked for complete sales and expense records, which took literally reams of paper to print out, then organize and bind into folders for me to ship (I was out of state at the time of the audit and they wouldn't move it to a local auditor). It took days to click through pages and pages of history at PayPal to provide a separate printed receipt for over 1,000 separate sales, just for starters. I simply used the QuickBooks export to do my accounting, no need to keep each individual receipt on paper.
In the end all those reams of paper added up to exactly what I reported on my taxes, to the penny, and the "investigation" was closed with no changes to my taxes.
I hope every year that the audit means they'll be less likely to audit me again since I always have the same big single deductions each year (suppliers mostly).
(And no, providing the disposition of the case is not the same thing as providing a disposition of the legal ruling by the court.)