Home topics finance tax Small Business Tax Small Business Making friends with your tax audit: What can it teach us? Guest Author May 30, 2016 “Embrace your tax audit” are the last words you’d expect to drop from the lips of a financial advisor, but that’s exactly what the head bean-counter from First Class Accounts is asking us to do. Clive Barrett, Executive Chairman of First Class Accounts, said the very idea of a tax audit struck fear into the hearts of small business owners across the country, however that frown could be turned upside down if we instead looked at the situation as an opportunity for growth. “With a tax audit, the ATO is simply telling us they’ve found something amiss,” Clive said. “And our immediate response is to put our heads in the sand and hope it will all go away. “However, if your doctor told you they’d found something amiss, you’d want to know immediately what the problem was and how to correct it. Wouldn’t you?” With that in mind, Clive said the dreaded tax audit should instead be viewed as an opportunity to get to understand the health of your business and how to address problem areas before they became too big to manage. “An audit forces you to conduct financial forensics in a way you never would do voluntarily. However, you can’t manage something as big as a tax audit alone,” he said. “In the same way you need a team of medical professionals to