Good Morning it’s Monday May 11th and I wanted to talk to you today about the collection and enforcement efforts that are ramping up across the country with the IRS and the state of California so I’ve spent a lot of time talking with collection agents and with auditors over the last few weeks and although there’s a moratorium on collection and examination activity through the middle of July it’s going to be open season after that let me explain why so the federal government gave away three trillion dollars in fonts and we all know nobody in their right mind is goin to raise taxes this year given the coronavirus climate so the government just gave away a lot of money they aren’t going to raise taxes so the natural conclusion is they’re going to get it back through enforcement and specifically they’re going to go after businesses so I want to share a couple of things that businesses can do now to protect themselves in the current coronavirus climate so the first thing that a business can do to protect itself is to get its finances in order and to come up with a projection for how the rest of the year is going to lock I realize that we’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty right now a lot of us are either stay at home orders we don’t know exactly when the lights are going to go back on but using a reasonable projection you should be able to track kind of what your revenue is going to be for the rest of the year and if you’ve got up you need funding or if you’ve got idle funding how that’s going to impact your decision to carry your business so the very first thing you need to do whenever you’re in a hole is you need to stop digging and figure out where you’re at having a longer projection at least through the end of the year is going to let you know number one how much cash is gonna come in number two what you project your expenses are and number three how much you’re gonna have left over a profit to devote to any back liabilities whether they be taxes or other obligations so you can get your arms around the situation the second thing you’re going to do is you’re going to stop being so not all liabilities are created equal so for example if you accrue payroll tax liability or sales tax liability in particular those are deemed as trust fund taxes those are money is that you hold in trust for somebody else so when you run a coffee shop and you sell a cup of coffee and you collect the sales tax that is your customer paying sales tax on a product you are holding that money in place for the state and you are remitting those funds so you are not allowed to spend that money and if you spend that money and you both with that tax liability later the government will come after you personally for those liabilities so you need to draw a line between the liability is that you could be held personally responsible ie trust fund taxes and other liabilities that your business only may be liable for and then you need to start prioritizing those liabilities based on who gets paid first but the important part about this is don’t spend money right now that’s not yours and the final thing that you need to do is build a plan so you’ve got your revenue projection you’ve got your expenses going out you know what you’re gonna owe in terms of liability and even if you’ve had cash challenges a lot of businesses have been really hurting by this we’ve had businesses that basically disappeared overnight even if you’re a million or a couple million dollars in debt right now there is a way out of this situation but what it’s gonna take is it’s going to take planning lights are gonna come back on in the IRS to the state as of July 15th so you could take the next three months particularly three months where you’re gonna be out of business and really build your financial situation 2% an offer to the IRS IRS collection agents are basically going to throw people into two buckets there’s the bucket of people that they can’t do anything with and there’s a bucket of people where there’s some meat on the bone they’re going to go after so the more that you can present yourself like bucket one and really minimize yourself as a target for the government that’s the way things are going to go so it’s about building a plan about minimizing your exposure on the collection side and then on the audit side you need to make sure your house is in order it’s finding.
Other Insights
Why Should I Hire Brotman Law to Represent Me With My Multi-State Tax Issue?
The way the law is written but how that law is enforced and how enforcement varies against from a state.
Why Should I Hire Brotman Law to Defend Me in My Criminal Tax Matter?
The IRS aside unless they think they’re going to be successful in a conviction and the biggest problem for clients.
Why Should I Hire Brotman Law to Defend Me in My Payroll Tax Audit?
The way from sitting down here in San Diego up into Northern California and we do a lot of these types of cases over the course.
How Does Billing Work at Brotman Law?
The fact that they bring on this attorney to handle this matter and then they put a retainer down.
What Is the Cost Structure at Brotman Law?
So the first thing I’ll tell you about the cost structure of our firm is we bill on an hourly basis. We don’t flat fee matters and our time is our time. Our staffs billing rates are set based on their level of experience and who they are, so at the bottom level we have our paralegals that bill at $150 an hour and at the top level we have me that bills at $525 an hour and then everybody else falls somewhere in between. So the way that we try and mitigate costs for our clients is by spreading work between the different levels. We try and generally have the lowest person who’s competent to do the work do the work in order to save cost. We’re not going to send a paralegal in on a criminal matter or we’re not going to send an attorney to go do $150 hour level work but we try and work within the structure that we have to be as efficient for the client as possible. I’m a small business owner myself and I believe in driving value. I believe in the work that we do providing value to our clients because we’re in tax and, because California and the IRS aren’t going away anytime soon, trust me when I tell you we’re not running out of work. So our team is not really incentivized to bill you any more or any less than what we have to. We bill you as much as
Who Will Be Working on My Matter at Brotman Law?
We have paralegals and we have administrative support staff most of our paralegals bill anywhere between 150 and 225 an hour.
What Is the Best Way to Communicate With the Firm?
So we have two methods of communication at the firm: we have email and we have phone calls. We don’t have text messages and the reason we don’t have text messages is because text messages are very hard to track internally and we like for all of our calls and all of our emails to come in and be documented so that they go into your file. If for some reason I’m out of the office one day, our senior attorney can pick up the file, can read through the notes and the history of communications, and be in lockstep with me and the decisions that I would make on the course of your matter. So the best way to handle communications from our firm is by segregating what the best type of communication is for longer explanatory things and things that are better reduced to writing, we prefer email. It helps get thoughts in order and we can more easily move emails under the file, although emails take a lot of time to compose sometimes so we tend to shy away from those.
How Long Should I Expect My Case to Last in the Firm?
The firm average about six months we have some that are longer and we have some that are much shorter longer or shorter depends.
What Makes Brotman Law Unique?
So I point to a couple of different things when I differentiate our firm from other firms. The first thing I would differentiate is that our firm is really built for businesses, for business owners and for corporate officers, and the reason for that is is I’m a small business myself. I love being a small business and I love all the challenges and the excitement and the risk that comes with running your own business. When I set up my tax firm, I wanted to build a business that catered to the need of businesses and to help those businesses help their clients and be the best platform that they could be so I designed a firm around not only fixing people’s tax problems but working with small businesses to make them the best versions of themselves that they can possibly become. A lot of that is accomplished through tax and the thing that we’re doing but it’s a gateway for something much much larger. Number two I would point to our experience in separating ourselves from other firms that are out there. We have a lot of experience particularly in dealing with