At year end, external auditors heading into the tax department do not generally rely on internal controls to reduce testing; a great deal of effort is focused on substantively testing the income tax balances on the financial statements. Tax processes are notoriously manual in nature with numerous adjustments required to manipulate general ledger information into useable tax information. We have compiled a list of the top ten tax controls every company should have in place with the emphasis (as expected) on monitoring controls.