When your tax ledger and your filed returns stop agreeing

What was broken

A wholesale distributor discovered material mismatches between its indirect-tax filings, income tax filings, and books of account, built up over several years. The inconsistencies raised the risk of notices and demands, and made the accounts unreliable for both financing and decision-making.

What we did

CapEasy carried out a multi-year reconciliation across indirect tax, income tax, and the financial statements — identifying the sources of divergence, correcting filings where required, and aligning turnover, credit, and tax positions into a single consistent picture. The corrections were documented to withstand any future regulatory review.

Where it landed

The company’s indirect-tax, income tax, and book positions were reconciled and brought into alignment, reducing exposure to notices and giving management reliable numbers to work from. A recurring reconciliation discipline was put in place.

Sales tax has no single filing — it has as many as you have nexus states

There is no federal sales tax and no single national return. Sales tax is imposed and administered state by state, and a business owes it wherever it has nexus — a connection to the state significant enough to trigger a collection obligation. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., states can require a remote seller with no physical presence to collect tax once it crosses that state’s own economic-nexus threshold, defined by revenue or transaction count in the state.

Those thresholds are set state by state and are not uniform. California and Texas, for example, both currently set their economic-nexus threshold at $500,000 in sales sourced to the state in the relevant period — but a business selling into a dozen states cannot assume every state uses that same figure, and each state’s own site is the only reliable place to confirm its current number before treating it as settled.

The books have to carry two different tax pictures, not one

Most multi-channel sellers now run both a direct channel, where the business itself collects and remits, and a marketplace channel, where a marketplace facilitator collects and remits on the seller’s behalf. Texas law requires a marketplace provider to “collect, report and remit state and local sales and use tax on all sales made through a marketplace,” and California recognises marketplace facilitators as retailers of record for the sales they facilitate once they meet the statutory criteria. In both states the seller still keeps a permit obligation and a record-keeping obligation for the sales the marketplace handles — Texas requires marketplace sellers to retain sales records for at least four years even when the marketplace is collecting the tax.

That split is exactly the mismatch pattern in this engagement, translated: a ledger that shows total sales tax payable, and a set of filed returns — direct-channel returns the seller files itself, and the tax a marketplace remitted on its behalf — that have to add up to that same figure, state by state. The two rarely stay in sync on their own. Marketplace remittance reports arrive on the platform’s schedule, not the seller’s close date; a state threshold gets crossed mid-year without anyone flagging the new registration; a return gets filed off a sales figure that does not match what the ledger later shows once returns and credits post.

The reconciliation is the control, not the return itself

The engagement’s method transfers directly: reconcile the tax positions against the books on a schedule, state by state, rather than discovering the gap when a notice arrives. In practice that means a working file, refreshed every period, that reconciles taxable sales per the books against taxable sales per each state return; separates marketplace-collected tax from directly-collected tax so each is checked against its own source; and tracks which states the business has crossed the economic-nexus threshold in, with the date it happened, so a registration is never filed months late.

CapEasy’s part in that work is the reconciliation itself — the nexus tracking, the marketplace-versus-direct split, the ledger tied to what was actually collected and remitted. Filing the returns and any position taken with a state on an open question is the work of your CPA and the partner CPA firms we work with across 15 US states.