7 Signs that Your Exemption Certificate Management Process is Putting You at Risk

Charles Maniace
May 21, 2020

Maintaining valid tax exemption certificates is one of the more difficult and labor intensive, yet critical, compliance requirements. Doing it correctly and completely is essential to protecting your business from audit exposure.

As the tax landscape continues to evolve and grow more complex, managing this process is becoming increasingly difficult and time consuming. Many companies are continuing to try to evolve and expand existing manual solutions to meet their new requirements but have found themselves falling further and further behind. The result is often a repository prone to missing or expired certificates that put your business in the cross hairs of auditors.

Knowing when you need help in managing the exemption certificate process is an important step in mitigating your audit risk. To assist you in assessing your own capabilities we’ve put together a list of key identifiers assembled from years of experience and conversations with hundreds of customers.

If any of these statements apply to your business and exemption certificate management process, it’s time to talk to the tax technology experts before the auditors ask to talk with you.

Seven signs you may need help:

  1. Our team is small, and we struggle to always request and track the receipt of exemption certificates from new customers.
  2. We don’t have the proper controls in place to track when certificates may be expiring so that we can request and receive new ones.
  3. Our customers find our certificate submission process to be cumbersome.
  4. Requesting exemption certificates from our customers is extremely time consuming and full of redundant tasks.
  5. We can’t easily track, or in some cases track at all exempt drop shipments We have yet to evaluate our need to collect and maintain certificates in the states where we are now collecting tax due to economic nexus.
  6. The number of exempt transactions booked in error is on the rise.
  7. Our existing process of managing exemption certificates is not scaling to meet or business expansion and growing compliance needs.

The best protection against a risk is often the simplest. In the case of exemption certificates, ensuring that you have the proper ones on file and current sounds easy. Yet the process of getting there can be anything but.

Automating your exemption certificate management process will ensure that you are protected against missing and expired certificates. It will also eliminate the hours upon hours your staff spends completing redundant tasks, freeing them up to focus on higher priority initiatives.

This process is complex and getting more complicated by the day. It’s OK to ask for help. If your organization identifies with any of these scenarios, talk to Sovos. We can support you seamlessly and ensure that the stress of exemption certificates becomes a thing of the past.

Sign up for Email Updates

Stay up to date with the latest tax and compliance updates that may impact your business.

Author

Charles Maniace

Chuck is Vice President –Regulatory Analysis & Design at Sovos, a global provider of software that safeguards businesses from the burden and risk of modern tax. An attorney by trade, he leads a team of attorneys and tax professionals that provide the tax and regulatory content that keeps Sovos customers continually compliant. Over his 20-year career in tax and regulatory automation, he has provided analysis to the Wall Street Journal, NBC, Bloomberg and more. Chuck has also been named to the Accounting Today list of Top 100 Most Influential People four times.
Share this post

North America Tax Information Reporting
March 22, 2024
Market Conduct Annual Statement Reminders and More

On the second Wednesday of each month, Sovos experts host a 30-minute webinar, Water Cooler Wednesday, to share the latest updates on statutory filings. In March, Sarah Stubbs shared information about the many filings due after March 1, from Market Conduct Annual Statements to health supplements for P&C and life insurers writing A&H businesses and […]

North America ShipCompliant
March 21, 2024
How Producers Can Build a DtC Shipping Market

Direct-to-consumer (DtC) shipping has become one of the leading sales models for businesses of all sizes and in all markets. The idea of connecting directly with consumers is notably attractive, as it helps brands develop a personal relationship and avoid costly distribution chains. Yet, for all its popularity, DtC is often a hard concept to […]

North America ShipCompliant
March 20, 2024
Key Findings from the 2024 DtC Beer Shipping Report

This March, Sovos ShipCompliant released the fourth annual Direct-to-Consumer Beer Shipping Report in partnership with the Brewers Association. The DtC beer shipping report features exclusive insights on the regulatory state of the direct-to-consumer (DtC) channel, Brewers Association’s perspective and key data from a consumer preferences survey. Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the […]

March 20, 2024
As the World Gets Smaller, Think Bigger About Global Tax Compliance

For the past few weeks back, my colleagues and I have been talking a lot about the importance of a global strategy when it comes to addressing today’s modern tax environments. On the heels of Sovos introducing the Sovos Compliance Cloud, many in our company’s leadership team have blogged about related topics and the critical […]

North America ShipCompliant
March 12, 2024
Florida HR 583 Set to Uncork Larger Format Wine Bottles

Florida wine lovers could soon enjoy a bigger selection of bottles based on a recent bill passed by the state’s legislature (HR 583) that would remove the existing cap on wine bottle sizes. What is Florida’s HR 583 bill? Currently, Florida law prohibits the sale of wine in bottles larger than one gallon (a little […]