Case Studies

Never blindly trust an ex. Or a business partner. Or anyone for that matter.

You don’t have to do everything yourself, but you should always enter financial partnerships with your eyes wide open.

One of my first representation cases involved a business owner who had trusted her ex to file two years of tax returns. Guess what? He didn’t. Ever wonder what happens if you don’t file your taxes? The IRS will kindly file a substitute return for you. That substitute return will include all of your income from every source along with the standard deduction.

Here’s another thing you might not know. When you owe money to the IRS and don’t make other arrangements, they can do things to make your life hard. They can garnish your wages, seize your bank and brokerage accounts, put a lien on your real and personal property, and, in extreme cases, take your property for sale.

When my client received a tax bill for everything her business made, offset by zero expenses, her whole livelihood was at stake. You can see why she showed up at BTM in tears.

The first thing I did was to contact the IRS and get her case put on hold for 30 days. After that, I prepared the tax returns for those two missing years, which revealed that the amount she actually owed the IRS – with all her appropriate deductions — was less than $5,000. I negotiated a payment plan that she could afford, and she was back on track.

Don’t even think about not paying sales taxes. 

Sales tax belongs to the state, and they don’t like it when you don’t give it to them.

This client owed the state more than $400,000 in unpaid sales taxes that he’d thought someone else in his company was handling.

Sales tax is not something to mess around with. You may collect sales tax, but it’s not yours. It belongs to the state. And if you don’t pay it to the state when you’re supposed to, it’s considered stealing. In this case, it didn’t matter that my client and his three companies had all declared bankruptcy. In Georgia, there’s no bankruptcy protection for not paying sales tax. My client was not just facing a huge debt, but also felony charges and a possible arrest.

When he came to BTM, I was able to stop further collection and enforcement efforts. I got $110,000 in penalties dropped and negotiated an offer in compromise.