With tax season officially underway, many corporate tax and accounting departments are busily preparing for the looming March deadline. Each year, however, tax and accounting mistakes end up costing U.S. businesses billions. In 2013 alone, U.S. businesses accumulated nearly $7 billion in IRS civil penalties stemming incorrectly reporting business income and employment values.
Despite a growing reliance on internal tools and technology, the potential for human error and its costly consequences remain. To uncover the most common mistakes plaguing corporate tax and accounting departments today, and find out how those mistakes vary across company size and industries, Bloomberg BNA conducted a survey of 200 in-house tax and accounting professionals, over half of which represent firms with revenues above $1 billion. From technological pitfalls to regulatory confusion, here’s a look at the top ten end-user and tax-and-accounting rule-based mistakes that may be costing your organization
1. Manually inputting incorrect data into an enterprise system.
With the amount of data entry that occurs in most accounting departments, it’s probably not much of a surprise that manually inputting incorrect data is the most common mistake. While the occasionally erroneous spreadsheet cell is inevitable, when left uncaught it can lead to an audit and penalties...
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Source: Dean Sonderegger (www.cfo.com)
