Audit indicators
Know your own position before somebody else assesses it.
The decision to audit is taken before anyone speaks to you. The tax administration holds its own analyses — ratio comparisons, risk profiles, summary risk assessment — and they determine who gets audited. The law requires no particular cause for the audit itself: under § 193 Abs. 1 AO an external audit is admissible at any commercial business. What the indicators influence is therefore not whether an audit is permissible, but how likely you are to be selected — and the expectation the auditor arrives with.
Why your own figures matter before the first contact
An indicator is a number taken from your own data and compared against an expectation. If you do not know it, you learn it from the audit order — and then you are arguing about a calculation somebody else drew up. If you do know it, you have two things: you know where the audit is heading, and you can explain where the deviation comes from. Both are worthless if they are produced only at the closing meeting.
What such an analysis must be measured against
The provisions in this table are German law. Most European legal orders know the same principle — set out verbatim and by country in the register of legal bases.
| Yardstick | Legal basis | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Admissibility of the audit | § 193 Abs. 1 AO | Admissible at any commercial business — an indicator is not a precondition, and it does not replace one. |
| Precedence of the accounts | § 158 Abs. 1 AO | Proper accounting shall be taken as the basis of taxation. |
| The threshold | § 158 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 AO | Only once there is cause to object to substantive accuracy — a statistical anomaly is not yet an objection. |
| The scope | § 162 Abs. 1 Satz 1 AO | Estimation applies only in so far as the bases cannot be established or calculated. |
| All circumstances | § 162 Abs. 1 Satz 2 AO | Including those that explain a deviation. |
| Favourable circumstances too | § 88 Abs. 1 Satz 2 AO | The authority must also take into account circumstances favourable to the parties. |
| The Czech Republic for comparison | § 92 Abs. 5 lit. c daňového řádu | There the statute says it expressly: the authority proves the facts that disprove the completeness of the records. |
Almost every deviation has an operational cause
Expected values assume an even course of business. Real businesses are not even: opening hours change, menus change, staff change, tills are replaced, payment methods shift, a refurbishment falls inside the audit period. The figure that stands out is rarely wrong — it is usually unexplained. And an explanation backed by evidence changes the starting position before anyone talks about an add-back.
What cannot be steered — and what can
The administration does not publish its selection mechanisms, and anyone promising otherwise promises too much. Something else can be steered: how explicable your own figures are. Whether a deviation is backed by a document is not decided by the authority but by the business — and beforehand.
What we contribute
We analyse your own data, determine the ratios an audit would draw on, and quantify them. For every deviation we look for the operational cause in the data and record whether it can be explained or whether it stands — including where it stands.
The legal provisions cited here are given for information and do not replace legal advice.