Royalty audit

Royalty audit: A royalty audit is a licensor's review (typically conducted by an external audit firm) of the licensee's royalty calculations, supporting sales data, and applied deductions for a historical period. Audits commonly turn up underpayments due to stale-master drift, disallowed deductions, or missed cooperative-mark splits.

Most licensee agreements with major licensors (CLC, Fanatics College, NFL, MLB) are audited at some point — often during the term, sometimes after termination. Audit defense requires recompute history, original statement versions, and per-period audit trail.