A company of any size issues tens of thousands of invoices a year, each classified by an eight-digit code that decides how much tax it pays. That code is chosen once, by someone who has since left the company, and then repeats forever — because the system copies the previous entry. That is how the same product, sold by two companies in the same sector, produces different tax burdens for a decade without anyone noticing.
The error is rarely gross. It is a matter of nuance: a basic-basket item classified as a taxed equivalent, an essential input never credited because the tax team did not know it entered the process, a substitution regime calculated on a presumed base the real price never reached. Each case is worth little. Multiplied by five years of invoices, it is worth a full year's investment budget.
The inverted audit walks the inspector's path backwards: same method, same cross-checks, same reading of the files the company already files with the State every month — looking for what was paid beyond. And there is a clock: the reform closes off taxable events under the old system, and the five-year limit erases a month of credit every month that passes. It is the only debt the State owes that lapses on its own, in silence, in its favour.
A test any director can run alone, today: ask for the list of the ten highest-volume products and the tax code of each. Then ask who chose those codes, and in what year. If nobody can answer both, the review has already justified itself — and the answer usually arrives with an embarrassed silence worth more than any diagnosis.
Diagnosis with defined scope, timeline and price, credited against success — so the analysis never depends on the result it is meant to find. Remuneration falls on realised benefit: cash refunded, credit actually offset or liability extinguished. Value identified in an opinion does not count; what counts is what appeared on the statement, or stopped leaving it.
Official sources, at the exact point — the article of law, the service or the search you can use today. None replaces analysis of the specific case, which is our work.
Say in two lines what you need to resolve. An account manager replies personally, in business hours, and the conversation starts where it makes a difference.