Recently, whenever I’ve blogged about indirect taxes in all their multifarious nefariousness — sales taxes, use taxes, excise taxes, and the rest of the gang — it’s been from the point of view that they’re a massive source of frustration for corporate taxpayers struggling to keep up with the endless changes, and a rising audit threat as governments scramble to replace revenues lost in the downturn.

But I may have missed an important aspect of this picture. Maybe it’s not all bad.

Seriously — sales tax refunds may be a hidden source of much-needed cash.

So says Deloitte, anyway, in a new CFO advisory. “Value leakages in this area drain cash, but past leakages create a tremendous possibility of generating refunds and recovering large sums of money,” the report enthuses.

How much money? As much as 2 percent to 3 percent of sales, Deloitte claims, based on its work on clients’ sales taxes. Naturally enough, the firm recommends starting the process by using “forensic accountants and consultants to quickly assess the opportunity,” and of course — I know what you’re thinking — those guys don’t come cheap. But the report also makes the intriguing claim that “a small portion of the cash recovered can effectively fund the expertise required to efficiently recover the cash, as well as the people, processes, and system transformations required to reduce value leakage from overpayment.”

I wouldn’t be surprised. At many organizations, the indirect tax obligation has long been the under-resourced poor relation of the income tax process, and it’s as easy to err in the direction of overpayment as underpayment. As Chris Walsh pointed out in a quote last month in International Tax Review, a London-based publication, “in a typical corporate tax department there are 12 people managing what is often a nil rate of corporate income tax but only one person handling the VAT position, which can amount to millions of dollars. There’s a big imbalance.” (Walsh is chief international indirect tax officer at Vertex, a tax technology provider.) U.S. companies may not have to worry about value added tax, but substitute sales and use taxes for VAT and you’ve got pretty much the same situation.

As to whether those heavy-duty forensic accountants and consultants are really necessary, I’m guessing a company can make a good start on its refund quest by calling on tax expertise within its own ranks, aided perhaps by a little investment in the kind of tech tools described by Bob Kugel here. ###