Adriana Garcia Reyes, MBA

Who is Adriana Garcia Reyes?

Adriana Garcia Reyes runs the in-house Sales and Use Tax (SUT) team at Kruze Consulting. Bringing two decades of experience in tax practice, she manages nexus studies, state sales tax registrations, Voluntary Disclosure Agreements (VDAs), and state audit defense for venture-backed startups. Her advisory ensures early-stage companies establish proper tax collection frameworks, avoid costly back-tax exposure, and remain audit-ready through every venture capital funding round.

Credentials and Education

• Master of Business Administration, Accounting, Aurora University
• Member, Institute for Professionals in Taxation (IPT)

Experience

I lead the Sales and Use Tax (SUT) team at Kruze Consulting, and I have spent 20 years in tax practice, the last five focused on venture-backed startups at Kruze. I am the first specialist a client meets when revenue starts flowing, as that is the moment sales tax risk becomes real.

A majority of my work comes down to determining whether a client owes sales tax somewhere and whether they know it yet. I run the nexus studies, which answer that question, reviewing where a company has taxable sales and how that triggers business registration and tax collection. From there, I oversee compliance, review the returns we prepare, and manage registrations as clients expand into new states. I also handle the questions that do not fit a template, exemption certificates, partial Research and Development (R&D) exemptions, and gray areas that surface as a startup scales. When a client gets audited, I represent them directly. I am currently defending client positions across multiple active sales tax audits with the New York Department of Taxation and Finance.

Clients frequently come to us after trying to manage sales tax through automated filing platforms on their own. Those tools can handle routine filings, but exemption disputes, audit notices, and nexus gray areas require hands-on advisory that software cannot provide. Founders want a dedicated expert accountable for the answer, not another platform to manage on top of everything else.

A common assumption I see among early-stage founders is that remote employees do not trigger state tax obligations. For sales tax purposes, a remote employee in a state is physical presence, and that can trigger an immediate registration requirement. I flag this early, before revenue starts, so clients are set up correctly from day one instead of cleaning up an exposure later. That early education is often the difference between a clean compliance record and a VDA down the road.

Areas of Expertise

• Sales and Use Tax (SUT) return preparation and compliance for venture-backed startups
• Multi-state nexus studies and physical-presence analysis
• Sales tax registrations across multiple states
• Voluntary Disclosure Agreements (VDAs) and penalty reduction for non-compliant periods
• State sales tax audit representation
• Exemption certificates and partial Research and Development (R&D) sales tax exemptions
• Sales tax treatment of Software as a Service (SaaS), including evolving state rules on taxability