About CensusAudit
Founded by the inventor of AvaTax. US Navy veteran-owned. Patent pending.
The founder
Rory Rawlings founded and architected AvaTax — the original sales-tax automation platform, adopted by roughly half of the Fortune 500. He wrote the taxability-content codes that still ship with the category-leading product, and he understands — because he designed it — that the engine’s point-in-polygon method was a cost-control trade: resolve to the ZIP code, drop a centroid, and accept that some percentage will land on the wrong side of a jurisdiction line.
In 2026, Mr. Rawlings filed a multi-part patent that replaces the approximation with deterministic accuracy. The first part is Cadastral Situs Resolution: every address resolved to the actual cadastral parcel, the parcel polygon tested against the jurisdiction boundary polygon to determine whether the transaction sits inside, outside, or across the line — making jurisdiction assignment deterministic. The second part is a Deterministic Statute-Bound Tax Determination that reads the controlling statute, regulation, and court decision directly, producing the same taxability answer for the same product and the same law, every time, with the citation attached.
CensusAudit applies that invention to the state-audit side. The same parcel spine that resolves jurisdiction for commercial determination, CensusAudit uses to audit those determinations for states — with the statute citation attached to every line. The technology is the same. The buyer is different. The data governance is separate and verifiable.
Before founding AvaTax, Mr. Rawlings served in the United States Navy. CensusAudit is a US Navy veteran-owned business.
Why separate data governance
CensusAudit sells the audit capability to states. The same accuracy technology that determines tax for sellers is used by CensusAudit to audit those determinations for states. Inside a single company, every seller would eventually ask whether their vendor is arming their auditor — and there would be no credible answer.
Separate companies with genuinely separate data governance is the answer. A state that adopts the census audit has a direct interest in sellers using the compliant upstream product, because the audit is already done — a real reduction in that state's audit cost. The separation is what allows the upside without the trust problem.
Hard commitment: CensusAudit maintains no shared customer data with any commercial determination platform. No seller’s transaction data can ever reach a state through a sister entity. This constraint is structural, not aspirational. It is stated publicly so every seller can verify it independently.
The name
Census is the auditor’s own term of art — examining an entire population rather than a sample. The name states the differentiator in the buyer’s vocabulary, in one word, against the exact method it replaces.
Work with us
If you administer tax for a state and want to see what a census audit looks like on your data, the conversation starts with a single email.
rory@censusaudit.com