Rendering Unto Caesar That Which Is Caesar’s. The Terrifying Ordeal Of A Tax Audit.
Imagine if you will, a pleasant, sunny Friday afternoon when the working week is almost complete and the weekend looms with the promise of time to do exactly what one feels like doing, when suddenly the spell is cruelly broken.
At 4.00 pm, into my office strolls my P.A. bearing a letter that had been hand delivered by some non- descript person from the civil service who drops said letter at reception with a dramatic flourish and departs with the words,’ have a nice weekend’.
Bastard !!!
I nonchalantly open said letter and, as soon as I see the Logo at the top right hand corner of the page, my blood turns to ice; my bowels to water and I immediately break out into a sweat as if I have just run a marathon in sub- Saharan heat.
We are being audited!!!!!
The text, just two paragraphs long, informs me, in breathtaking brevity that on Monday morning to expect two auditors from the tax office who will arrive at our offices at 8.00 a.m. sharp. Please to have ready all of the company’s documentation including vehicle log books, receipts, statements, payroll advice, invoices and bank records for the preceding twenty- four months.
I rise on wobbly legs, stumble to the accounts department and hysterically scream, “Barbarians are at the gates, man the ramparts!!!”
My CFO (a rather adept financial whizz, whom I always suspected that, in a previous life worked as an accountant for a Colombian drug cartel,) pales slightly but rises to the occasion and begins to issue orders in rapid fire accountant speak which, in my distressed state sounds as if he is speaking a long forgotten dialect from rural Romania.
Sarah, the junior is dispatched to the stationary store to purchase ten log books so that we can fraudulently insert mileage records into said books for the use of company vehicles. The rest of the team is assigned to begin collecting and dare I say it, shredding documents relating to our previous years trading. He then announces that there will be no weekend for the hapless staff even though one poor soul is getting married the following day. “ Postpone it,” he shouts, “ and anyway, you shouldn’t be marrying that excuse for a human being, he’s a complete pillock.”
I am sent back to my office to pace the floor, panic and consume strong drink.
Forty- eight hours later the boardroom table in the conference room is festooned with piles of lever arch files arranged neatly in long orderly lines, each containing the impeccable records of our company with my personal expense and ‘entertainment’ records removed, shredded and burned in secret behind the building.
The log books, pristine on the Friday now resemble something akin to the dead sea scrolls having been ‘worked on ‘ all weekend by the art department with each page filled, using different pens, and then suitably doctored with all manner of dirt, wine and coffee stains and I suspect a hint of baby vomit.
At 8.00am sharp the barbarians arrive and I head to reception to welcome the uninvited intruders into the inner sanctum of my life.
Standing there are two bespectacled gentlemen in shiny, beige polyester suits with plastic pen protectors on their shirt pockets, replete with four ball- point pens of different colours. The elder of the two (a veteran, I found out later of thirty five years standing who had conducted over five hundred audits, many of which have resulted in lengthy jail terms for errant directors)
He removes his hat, proudly revealing a splendid comb over with the section of his hair at the front standing up aggressively, like a cobra ready to strike. The hair is so thin that I can see right through it to the wall behind; it reminded me of a thought bubble clinging tightly to his skull.
The younger of the two is almost a clone of his boss only decades younger but obviously in love with his profession and honoured to be working with one of the doyens of the department.
Their movements are poetry in motion as they are led to the conference table where they sit down in unison and perform a ritual that must have been choreographed by someone from the Bolshoi Ballet. The briefcases are placed on the table, clicked open at exactly the same time; folders are removed, yellow legal notepads laid next to them, the pens are removed from the plastic shirt protectors and laid out neatly in a line atop the pads. Briefcases are then shut, clicked closed and placed on the floor next to their chairs.
“ Shall we begin?” says Mr. Comb Over, which is my cue to depart, leaving my CFO to fight the good fight. I retire to my office, trying to dispel thoughts of spending the next ten years confined to a cell that I will share with a 300lb gorilla who goes by the name Bubba, incarcerated for performing unspeakable sex acts on advertising executives half his size.
The week passes in a blur as I am summoned at regular intervals to the conference room to identify a tatty receipt that has been carefully coded to something called ‘stationary supplies’ yet I know is a docket from one of my favourite watering holes. I mean who spends $700 odd dollars a week on pencils?
Somehow, against all odds, thanks to the talents of the CFO and his loyal staff we make it through and I go to the conference room for the final verdict.
The barbarians are waiting to bid me farewell and I am told that ‘on the whole’ we have been doing our civic duty by collecting taxes and remitting same to that temple of fear.
On his way out, as the veteran dons his raincoat (even though it's not raining ) and his hat, covering that magnificent comb over, he turns to me and says with a bemused smile, tapping the side of his nose in conspiratorial style “Oh, I must compliment you on the vehicle log books, they are almost a work of art”
With that they sweep out, leaving us hopefully forever.
