Initial situation
The customs office opened an excise duty audit at a client operating a small independent brewery, covering two production seasons. The inspectors wanted to verify that the quantities of beer declared and the excise duty calculated matched actual production. The client's team was small, partly on holiday, and unsure what the auditors would actually need.
Our solution
We took over communication with the customs office from the first phone call and translated the audit request into a concrete checklist: the statutory daily production register a small brewery must keep, broken down by brand, showing beer produced, beer released and stock on hand; the brew sheets for every batch in the audited periods; and, because inspectors typically cross-check production against sales, cash register turnover for the same months. We negotiated a realistic timetable so the brewmaster could assemble the records after returning from leave, and submitted the first tranche on the client's behalf.
Result
The audit ran in an orderly way with a single point of contact, no missed deadlines and no penalties for late submission. The client learned which records the authorities expect and how to keep them, reducing the burden of any future inspection. For a small producer subject to excise rules, having an adviser handle the authority directly is often the difference between a routine review and a drawn-out process.
