After Your First Corporate Tax Filing — What Businesses Are Facing and How to Respond

Overview
Submitting the first corporate tax return is an important milestone. The period that follows is equally important, since most businesses will now face clarifications, data requests, or internal improvement actions. This article explains the most common post-filing themes and provides a response plan for finance leaders who want to institutionalize good practices for the next cycle.

What We Are Seeing Across Companies

• Reconciliations that need refinement, especially around depreciation, expense disallowances, and consolidations.
• Questions on reliefs and elections due to incomplete supporting evidence or ambiguous positions.
• Transfer pricing disclosures that lack clear narratives or consistent benchmarking.
• Audit timing pressures that create sequencing issues between sign-off and filing.
• Documentation stored across emails and drives, which makes retrieval difficult during reviews.

Your Post-Filing Action Plan

• Perform a structured reconciliation between the return and audited financials, then retain the workpapers in a central repository.
• Build a supporting file with schedules, calculations, and policy notes. Include management judgments and sign-offs.
• Review intercompany transactions and ensure pricing is consistent with contracts and operations.
• Identify control gaps that caused last-minute changes and assign owners to fix root causes.
• Calibrate your compliance calendar to sequence audit completion and filing with comfortable buffers.

Controls and Process Enhancements

• Introduce a close checklist that links GL close, audit deliverables, and tax return schedules.
• Automate key reconciliations where possible and document variance thresholds.
• Use versioned templates for recurring workpapers to ensure consistency year over year.
• Define issue logs and escalation paths for material findings during close and audit.

Risk Management Considerations

• Monitor positions that rely on reliefs or elections and maintain evidence that conditions are met.
• Track related party exposures with dashboards that summarize margins, volumes, and exceptions.
• Prepare a short response playbook for regulatory queries, including owners and timelines.

How Univia Can Help

Univia supports clients with post-filing reviews, tax health checks, transfer pricing documentation, and calendar design. We help standardize workpapers, define accountabilities, and implement improvements without disrupting the business.