Tax controversy, damages & forensic matters
Financial Records Reconstruction & Substantiation
The books don't survive contact with the examiner or the expert. The underlying paper is all there — in eleven boxes and four shoeboxes.
The problem
A matter turns on what the financial records actually show, and the bookkeeping was never built to be defended. Categories drifted. Personal and business ran through the same accounts. Someone reconciled by memory for two years.
The substantiation usually exists — in receipts, card and bank statements, invoices, cancelled checks and delivery paperwork, most of it scanned badly or not at all. Rebuilding it by hand is hundreds of hours at the point in the engagement where the budget has already gone to the dispute itself.
We do that rebuild as a defined project: read the primary documents, match them to the ledger, and produce a substantiation file that counsel, the examiner or the expert can follow line by line.
What you get
- A line-by-line substantiation file: each claimed item 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
- Categorization consistent with the return or schedule as filed, with every reclassification flagged
- Exhibit-ready schedules with Bates or page cites for Tax Court, examination or damages presentation
- OCR accuracy report and a log of documents that could not be read reliably
- Working files in a format the CPA, attorney or expert of record can extend and hand on
How the work runs
Intake and inventory
Boxes, drives and shoeboxes are inventoried and digitized. Physical media can be shipped, with chain-of-custody 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
The cited file, the exception report and the reconstructed ledger are delivered for review by the professional of record.
Common questions
Are you providing tax or accounting advice?
No. Rapid Resolution Group does not give tax advice, does not represent taxpayers, and does not offer opinions on the treatment of any item. The engagement is technical: reading the primary documents and assembling the substantiation. Every position remains the judgment of the licensed CPA, EA, attorney or expert of record.
Who is the client?
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 party 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 shows the professional exactly where the exposure is before the other side 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 years covered. The scoping sample produces a fixed price and a delivery date before the engagement is signed.
Start with a scoping call and a sample
Tell us about the matter and the data. For anything document-heavy, a representative sample under an appropriate agreement lets us return a processed slice, an accuracy report on it, and a fixed price for the full job before anything is committed.