We have found that we are continually in one tax audit cycle or  
another, so we have decided to do just what you described -- set any  
record series that may be subject to tax audit at 10 years. If the  
audit runs longer (which would be rare), we would issue a legal hold  
at that point. The retention for these series was recommended to be  
Completion of Tax Audit or 10 years. We are trying to eliminate as  
many conditional retention periods as we can. Since most of our tax  
audits ran very near 10 years we just went with the longer retention  
so we wouldn't have to figure a way to notify everyone who may hold  
these records when the tax audit was complete.

That being said, we haven't actually had to live with this yet as our  
retention schedule has not been approved yet -- we're aiming for the  
end of the year.


Nolene Sherman
Records Manager since 1996. Gone wonky since 1998.
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On Nov 16, 2010, at 7:31 PM, Greene, Ben wrote:

> Curious to see how folks who have a functional/record series level
> retention schedule deal with tax audits.
>
> "Most" financial records are 6/7 years, but most of our tax audits  
> cover
> a 10 year period so I am giving consideration to changing the  
> retention
> periods on many record series to reflect 10 yrs instead of 6 or 7.  In
> the past, I have taken the approach that a tax audit is treated the  
> same
> as a litigation hold in that the record is held past its retention
> period to satisfy the open audit period.  However, if a company
> continually needs to examine 10 years for tax audits, what is the risk
> of just changing the retention to 10 yrs?
>
>
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
>
> Thanks.
>
>
>
> Ben Greene, CRM
>
> [log in to unmask]

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