If you have just received notification that you are being audited, you are probably a little bit nervous. However, if you’ve been honest with your accounting, you should really have absolutely nothing to fear when you get an audit. However, this is not an easy thing to keep in mind. It is easy to let your imagination run wild, and think about all of the fees and scrutiny that you could be subject to.
One thing that’s important to keep in mind that people aren’t always audited because there is something wrong with their taxes, many times they are just picked at random. They will just randomly choose some people to be audited to make sure that nothing is wrong, not necessarily because they think that something is wrong.
So first, don’t panic if you find out you’ve been audited. It stinks a lot, but it’s not the end of the world. Be truthful, give them all of the information that you need to know, and if you have kept good records you should be just fine and come out of the audit unscathed. If you try to lie or stretch the truth, that is a very bad idea. You will get found out if you try to lie at all, so you need to just tell the truth. Obviously this should not be very hard to do if you have been truthful all along and don’t have anything to hide.
Which brings me to my next point… keep good records or all of your financial information. If you can’t find things and don’t keep record of events, you could have hard time proving things that really did happen happened. That’s why it’s a must to keep good records of all of your financial happenings. That way, if the auditors are looking for something, you’ll know right where to find it. Keep all of your important receipts, proof of your income, proof of your expenses, and everything else that is really financially relevant. You never know what exactly the auditors are going to want or are going to be looking for, so you need to be able to have access to anything at a moment’s notice. That is the way that you can best proceed pain-free through the audit, and survive with as minimal inconvenience as possible.
So if you do get audited, don’t panic. Keep good records of everything, and then you should be able to easily comply with the auditors and survive a tax audit. In the end, as long as you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t have anything to be worried about. Just remember that just because you are being audited, it does not mean that the auditors think that there is something wrong with your financial information, or that you are hiding anything. It might just mean that you were chosen at random, and with just a little bit of work, you will be able to survive the tax audit.