For CPAs & tax attorneys
Expense Substantiation & Records Reconstruction
The books don't survive contact with the examiner. The underlying paper is all there — in eleven boxes and four shoeboxes.
The problem
A client walks in with an examination notice and bookkeeping that was never built to be defended. The categories drifted. Personal and business ran through the same account. Someone reconciled by memory for two years.
The substantiation usually does exist — in receipts, card statements, invoices, cancelled cheques and delivery paperwork, most of it scanned badly or not at all. Rebuilding it by hand is dozens of staff hours at a point in the engagement where the budget has already been spent on the dispute itself.
This is that rebuild, done as a defined technical project: read the primary documents, match them to the ledger, and produce a substantiation file the examiner can follow line by line.
What you get
- A line-by-line substantiation file: each claimed expense tied to its source document and page
- Reconstructed ledger built from primary records rather than from the contaminated books
- Exception report — claimed items with no supporting document, and documents with no claimed item
- Duplicate and double-counting detection across overlapping statements and receipts
- Categorisation consistent with the return as filed, with every reclassification flagged
- OCR accuracy report and a log of documents that could not be read reliably
- Working files in a format your team can extend, amend and hand to the examiner
How the work runs
Intake and inventory
Boxes, drives and shoeboxes are inventoried and digitised. Physical media can be shipped, with handling terms agreed in advance.
Calibrated extraction
Receipts, statements and invoices are read with the pipeline scored against controlled ground truth first — the error rate is measured before the real records run.
Matching and reconciliation
Documents are matched to ledger entries; unmatched items in both directions are isolated rather than forced into a bucket.
Substantiation file
You receive the cited file, the exception report, and the reconstructed ledger, ready for review by the CPA or attorney of record.
Common questions
Are you providing tax advice?
No. Rapid Resolution Group does not give tax advice and does not represent taxpayers before the IRS. The engagement is technical: reading the primary documents and assembling the substantiation. Every position, classification and representation remains the judgment of the licensed CPA, EA or tax attorney of record.
Who is the client — the firm or the taxpayer?
Preferably the firm. Engaging through counsel or the CPA keeps the work product inside the professional's file and keeps the chain of responsibility clean. Direct engagement by a business owner is possible but is the less common arrangement.
What if a document simply does not exist?
Then it is reported as missing. The exception report names every claimed item with no supporting document, which is often the single most useful output — it tells the professional exactly where the exposure is before the examiner finds it.
How bad can the source material be?
Thermal receipts faded to grey, phone photos of paperwork, multi-generation photocopies and handwritten ledgers are the normal input. Anything that cannot be read to an acceptable confidence is logged as unreadable rather than guessed, so nothing fabricated enters the file.
How long does a reconstruction take?
It scales with document count and condition rather than with tax years. The scoping sample produces a fixed price and a delivery date before the engagement is signed.
Start with a sample of your corpus
Send a representative slice — a few hundred pages is plenty. You get back the processed output, an accuracy report against that slice, and a fixed price for the full job before any commitment.