How My Background as an FDOR Auditor Shapes All Three Phases of My Practice

People sometimes ask why I structure my practice around three distinct services — a readiness review before an audit, representation during one, and a follow-up review after — instead of just offering “audit help” and leaving it at that.

The honest answer is that the three-phase approach isn’t a marketing structure. It’s how I actually think about audits, because it’s how I was trained to think about them — first at Deloitte & Touche, then as an auditor for the IRS, and finally as an auditor for the Florida Department of Revenue itself. Sitting on that side of the table for as long as I did changes how you see every stage of the process, not just the middle of it.

Here’s what I mean, phase by phase.

Before the Audit: I Know What Auditors Are Trained to Look For First

When I was auditing for the Florida DOR, the first thing I did on almost every case wasn’t glamorous. It was pulling the general ledger, checking exemption certificate files against reported exempt sales, and scanning for the kinds of gaps that show up in nearly every business: fixed asset purchases with no use tax accrued, resale certificates that are expired or simply missing, related-party transactions that were never taxed correctly.

Auditors develop a checklist in their heads within the first few years on the job, and it doesn’t change much from business to business. When I run a Pre-Compliance Readiness Review for a client now, I’m running that same checklist — except I’m running it for the client instead of against them. I’m not guessing at what an auditor might find. I know, because I used to be the one finding it.

That’s the difference between a generic compliance review and one built from the auditor’s actual methodology.

During the Audit: I Know How the File Gets Built — and Reviewed

Representation is where the auditor’s-eye view matters most, because an audit isn’t really a conversation between you and the auditor sitting across the table. It’s a file being built for someone else — a supervisor, a review unit — who will read it after the fact and never meet you at all.

Knowing that changes how I handle everything during an active audit:

• What gets sent, and what doesn’t.I know which document requests are standard procedure and which ones are the auditor testing how far they can expand the scope.
• How sampling actually gets used.I’ve built statistical samples myself, so I know where they’re defensible and where a client has real grounds to push back.
• What’s actually negotiable.Some things — penalty compromise, certain interest calculations, timing issues — have real flexibility. Others are set by statute, and I don’t waste a client’s time or credibility pretending otherwise.
• How the file reads to someone who wasn’t in the room.Every response I help prepare is written with the supervisor’s later review in mind, not just the field auditor’s.

None of this is about being adversarial. It’s about knowing the actual mechanics of the process well enough to manage it instead of just reacting to it.

After the Audit: I Know Why the Same Businesses Get Audited Again

This is the phase people are most surprised by, but it’s the one my background affects the most directly.

As an FDOR auditor, I saw the same businesses come back through the system every few years — sometimes because the industry was a recurring audit target, but just as often because whatever caused the first assessment was never actually fixed. The exemption certificate process didn’t change. The POS system was never reconfigured. The independent contractor classification stayed exactly as it was, findings and all.

A Follow-Up Readiness Review exists because I’ve seen, firsthand, what happens when that correction doesn’t happen: the next audit finds the same issue, sometimes going back further, sometimes with penalties compounding because it’s now a repeat finding. Knowing what the DOR is likely to check on a re-audit — and roughly when they’re likely to come back — lets me help clients close the loop instead of just closing the file.

Why This Matters More Than the Marketing Framing

I could describe all of this more simply as “before, during, and after service offerings,” and in a sense, that’s exactly what they are. But the reason they work together isn’t that they’re packaged together — it’s that they all come from the same source: years of sitting on the auditor’s side of the process, at three different institutions, seeing the same patterns repeat across thousands of businesses.

Most tax professionals who represent clients in Florida DOR audits have never worked inside the Department. I have. That’s not a credential I mention to sound impressive — it’s the actual foundation of how I approach every phase of a client’s audit, from the first readiness review to the last follow-up check.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Florida Department of Revenue audits. If you’d like to know where your business currently stands in this process — before, during, or after — feel free to reach out.