International tax compliance for auditors and CFOs

Any financial executive who has attempted to find his or her way through the labyrinth of the Code's international tax provisions likely knows that even the most trusted tax counselors often offer only inadequate guidance. With the Obama administration planning to hire some 1,500 new international tax examiners, and current business conditions fraught with risk, an overlooked international tax exposure could very well put a medium-sized company's very viability in peril. So it is only prudent for financial executives to do a checkup, of sorts, of their companies' operations to ensure that there are no looming unidentified cross-border tax issues. This is especially true for companies large enough to have multinational operations but still small enough to be below the threshold of the Coordinated Examination Program that the IRS uses to audit large, publicly traded multinational corporations.