video-blog

What Types of Collection Actions Can California Take Against Me If I Am in Another State?

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This is a common question we get from prospective clients. I get a lot of clients who are on the East Coast for example and they’re in New York or North Carolina or Florida or any one of those Atlantic states and they say “well I’m all the way over here, I’ve never been to California, I don’t like to travel to California, I don’t plan on going to California so if I owe money in California for state sales tax, for state income tax liability, what can they really do to me?” And the answer to that is they can do a whole lot to you. The reason for that is while you may not have contact with California and you may not step foot in California, probably the people that you do business with or the banking institutions that you use or the third parties that you use have some sort of nexus with California. For example, if you live on the East Coast and you use Bank of America, we have Bank of America branches in California.

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What Do I Do If There Is a Serious Error on My Return and I Get Audited?

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So the first thing you need to do if there’s a serious error on your return is to understand what your risk is. Was the error caused willfully? Was it not caused willfully? This is not the time to be an advocate. You need to answer yourself honestly because it’s always important to understand where the truth is in order to find out what your position is and the position you’re going to take in negotiating with the Auditor. If the error was a simple mistake and there’s no criminal liability, then the decision needs to be made on whether or not you’re going to disclose that to the auditor or not. If you don’t disclose it to the auditor and the auditor catches it later, there could be consequences in terms of penalties; however if you get out in front of the issue and disclose it, although you’re on

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How Much Is it Going to Cost for Brotman Law to Defend Me on My Multistate Tax Issue?

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You know, well that’s a broad question. It obviously depends on the facts, depends on how much trouble you’re in and it depends on how much work we’re going to do. So the answer to that is I can’t tell you off the bat but what I will tell you is my hourly billing rate is $525 an hour, our junior paralegal bill is at $150 an hour and then the rest of our attorneys and staff are somewhere in between. For most multi-state taxation issues the important part is strategy. So a lot of clients come to us and we’ll do a consultation we do a paid consultation. We’ll sit down for 60 or 90 minutes and we’ll develop a strategy and then in some cases, that client can just go off and execute that strategy and they don’t need us any further. Some clients after that strategy session, after we’ve built the plan, want us to stay and help execute the plan for one reason or another. So in those situations we usually bifurcate the work between our senior attorneys which are anywhere between $350 and $525 an hour and then our paralegals which are anywhere between $150 and $225 an hour. From a cost perspective the most important thing that I like to stress is efficiency. So I certainly don’t want to bill anybody any more than I have to. I don’t want to bill them any less than what it takes to get the job done but I’m a small business owner myself and trust me, I understand cost. One of the benefits of the way that I look at cost is I’m approaching this from a small business perspective. I want to make sure clients are getting value for the services that we’re providing. I want to make sure that

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