I was recently talking to a major distributor who had just gone through a tax audit nightmare. The taxes in question vary based on the location to which the goods were shipped. What should have been a straightforward audit turned into a complex, expensive process because in many cases the customer shipping addresses had changed over time, and the distributor’s ERP system, like most such systems, kept no historical records of those old addresses, so they could not guarantee that the invoices they generated for past shipments showed the actual shipping location. (more)