A desk audit is a type of audit conducted within the tax authority in pursuance of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation. This type of documentation review is carried out on the basis of tax returns provided by the payer, as well as other documents that would confirm the calculation and payment of taxes.
A
desk audit is carried out by
tax officials without special permission in the form of an order from the management of this body in accordance with their functional responsibilities. The duration of this verification process is no more than three months from the date of the actual provision of the necessary documents to the inspectors. This date is considered the beginning of the audit.
In pursuance of Article 31 of the Tax Code of the Russian Federation, the tax authorities may, when reviewing the necessary documentation, call the payer in writing to provide some clarification. In addition to the above, a desk audit allows receiving information about the activities of the payer in cooperation with counterparties. These business entities also request documents from the tax authority for this interaction. Such a check is called a “counter”.
A desk check is to monitor the completeness and correctness of filling in all the necessary details, the correctness of calculations of the submitted reports, the comparability of their results, as well as compliance with the approved rules for filling out these reports.
If certain violations of the law are revealed by the payer, the inspectors draw up a verification act. In the case of a calculated tax surcharge revealed by a desk audit, the tax authority shall send a request for payment of the specified amount from interest. If the submitted claim is not fulfilled by the taxpayer within the established time period, then the tax authority decides the question of collecting the amount of tax and interest on a mandatory basis.
A desk audit, according to the Tax Code of the Russian Federation, can cover no more than three years of the entity's activity that preceded the audit.
The modern Russian tax policy has chosen the priority direction of control work to strengthen analytical work with the introduction of a comprehensive economic and legal analysis of the financial and economic activities of entities. Therefore, the concept of tax control is reduced to conducting desk audits. This is due to such circumstances:
- desk audit - a less labor-intensive form of tax control and amenable to automation;
- with this type of verification work, it is possible to cover all taxpayers who submitted reports to the tax authorities. And when conducting field audits, tax authorities can check only a quarter of the total number of payers.
Also, desk verification can be important in two ways. The first is the controlling means of the accuracy and reliability of tax returns. The second purpose of such a check is to use it as a guideline in the selection of payers for field trips.