By: Mark Fields | Senior Manager – Property Tax
One of Invoke Tax Partners’ key business personal property tax differentiators is our attention to detail when conducting manufacturing site inspections. Conducting these inspections on-site allows our consultants to meet and interview local personnel, and physically account for assets in place and any issues the facility might be facing. These can include: a production decrease, ghost assets no longer on-site, and idle assets no longer in production. More often than not, a thorough manufacturing site inspection leads to additional property tax refunds and savings that standard depreciation tables don’t account for.
An Invoke manufacturing site inspection involves an in-depth understanding of our clients and their operations. Our site inspections provide us with better insight into our clients manufacturing process and what each production line is responsible for. We are able to identify additional property tax savings opportunities through accelerated depreciation on particular assets simply based on the fact that we were able to physically see the assets lifecycle and discuss the process with the facility manager.
Being on-site also provides the advantage of being able to embed identified value issues proactively within a filed personal property return. Site inspections help to maintain a regular fixed asset inventory that becomes a vital part of bookkeeping for accurate business personal property taxes. We’ve found that it is very common for a business to be paying property taxes on assets they no longer own. For this reason, our expert property tax consultants schedule our annual site inspections prior to the statutory return filing deadline to ensure inventory is up to date and the risk of overpayment is mitigated. Learn more about the importance of conducting a regular fixed asset inventory here.
Our proactive approach to embedding savings within renditions provides our clients with potential property tax savings on the front-end of the return and sometimes without the need to enact the appeal process. We have found that many times the jurisdictions will accept our proactive returns as filed, therefore we are able to provide our clients with property tax savings without the hassle of the appeal process. In the event a jurisdiction does not accept a proactive return and the traditional appeal process is deemed necessary, our site inspection process becomes critical in valuation discussions with the respective jurisdictions. Boots physically on-site allow us to provide critical site-specific information at a vital time when jurisdictions may otherwise lack the necessary information to determine an appeal result.
Invoke has the knowledge and ability to provide these inspection opportunities to all types of clients, specifically manufacturers throughout the United States. To learn more about our how our site inspections fit into our four key business personal property tax differentiators, click here.
