YOU & THE TAX AUTHORITIES

Dealings between taxpayers and the tax authorities are not always balanced. Taxpayers may feel powerless or ill prepared to respond to an information request or undergo a tax audit. This can result in anxiety and financial disaster for both companies and their managers. 

In order for a tax audit to be successful, the taxpayer must be prepared both before and during the audit, by continually discussing technical issues and facts with the auditor. This can involve a lot of time and energy, which taxpayers do not have as a result of having to manage their everyday affairs. 

Our lawyers can draw on their experience and specific knowledge of tax law and your economic environment in order to effectively protect your interests. We aim to obtain the best result for our clients within the shortest timeframe by co-operating with the tax authorities. We will however defend you in court where appropriate. 

Our lawyers can draw on their skill, tenacity and experience in order to defend you in dealings with the tax authorities.

• Preliminary work

We can help you with requests for information or clarification, tax audits (either on site or dematerialized), accounting audits, an examination of your personal tax position with the right to reply (ESFP), monitoring of exchanges and verbal discussions with the tax authorities, in liaison with your accountant where appropriate. 

We can help you prepare for an accounting audit so that you can provide the auditor with all relevant supporting documents and our tax analysis.

• Litigation

We file the necessary applications to enable our clients to obtain the cancellation or refund of unjustified taxes.

We file litigation claims (a prerequisite for all litigation proceedings), monitor proceedings before the lower administrative and judicial courts (administrative court or Tribunal de Grande Instance) and appeal courts (Administrative Court of Appeal and Court of Appeal).

We assist you and monitor proceedings before the supreme courts (Conseil d’État or Cour de Cassation) in liaison with a barrister.

• We can defend you in the event of a tax reassessment

If a tax reassessment notice is issued as a result of an accounting or premises audit, we can defend you throughout the procedure to enable you to put forward your arguments: taxpayer’s observations, appeal to a higher authority (chief auditor, division auditor, local auditor, local conciliation committee, local committee for direct taxes and income tax).

• Offensive ‘cost-killer’ approach

Due to various legislative and case law amendments combined with our expertise, we can offer our clients tools to optimise their tax position and recover taxes they should not have paid.

We regularly observe situations where clients have been overtaxed due to errors in determining their tax base or tax position. Taxpayers are often unaware of the situation, which can result in their paying unjustified taxes for years.

We adopt an approach that enables us to recover as much money as possible for our clients.