Topic: What Are Things That I Should Look for When Hiring a Tax Attorney?
I have a favorite saying in the office which I used with a number of my clients.
It’s called right person, right seat.
I have a favorite saying in the office which I used with a number of my clients. It’s called right person, right seat. So the important thing in any professional services relationship whether it’s a tax attorney or a CPA or any other professional advisor is making sure you have the right person sitting in the right seat to do the right job. The problem with a lot of tax attorneys is a lot of tax attorneys focus on federal issues and they focus on a very limited scope of federal issues. The reason for that is a lot of the traditional tax litigation appears in a judicial setting. So when you’re interviewing a tax attorney and they mentioned they go to court a lot that should be a sign that perhaps this person may or may not be
Topic: Why Should I Hire Brotman Law to Defend Me in My Sales Tax Audit?
We’ve dealt with some very difficult cases and gotten some really phenomenal results.
I credit that to the hard work and diligence of our team.
We’ve dealt with some very difficult cases and gotten some really phenomenal results. I credit that to the hard work and diligence of our team. Brotman Law really understands sales tax audits. We understand the tax law surrounding why sales are taxable and why they’re not taxable. We understand the tax procedure in terms of understanding the interactions with the auditor and their manager and the district principal auditor and then through the appeals process and up through the office of tax appeals and finally we understand statistical sampling which is a very rare quality in attorneys. Most attorneys don’t get a good knowledge of statistics. It’s not something that they teach you in law school but statistical sampling and being able to sustain a data fight in the context of a sales tax audit is a very admirable quality. We want to be on not only equal footing with the auditor, but we want to have the superior advantage during the entire audit because in our experience that’s the way you get results for the client. We use a very measured approach: we measure twice and we cut once. But our methods are strategic – they’re designed to make the problem and the process as less burdensome for our clients as possible and they’re designed to move them through the sales tax audit process quickly with as little exposure as possible. We are very good at what we do in the course of sales tax audits. We fight, we have a strategic tenacity and we do the best we can to leverage our efforts to get you the best result. I encourage you to sit down with us, give us the facts, let us look at your documents and let us start formulating a strategic plan.
Topic: Representing Myself vs. CPA vs. Tax Attorney: Who Should Represent Me?
I would tell you that sales tax audits are very complicated.
They’re complicated because of the amount of data involved.
I would tell you that sales tax audits are very complicated. They’re complicated because of the amount of data involved. They’re complicated because they involve statistics and they’re complicated because sales tax law is kind of a different animal than basic federal income tax law. Unless the people from your company or you personally have experienced dealing with sales tax audits, I almost never recommend that a client handle the audit themselves even if the client is going to work to prepare the documents necessary for the audit and do the prep work. I always maintain that it’s better to have a representative as the face of the audit versus having the client do it themselves. With respect to CPAs, the biggest problem that I see with CPA representation is that a lot of CPAs come from a compliance background and what I mean by that is when you’re a CPA, your job is to fill out tax forms and to fill them out accurately. The term certified public accountant means that you have public trust in preparing financial statements. That’s where CPA comes from. When you’re thinking about compliance oftentimes it’s very hard to shift into an advocacy focus and the difference between attorneys and CPAs is that attorneys mostly live on the advocacy side of things. So whereas most CPAs are compliance based (for example perceiving an audit notice with a document request and turning over all the documents to the auditor) a tax attorney would know to fight that. It’s not to say that some CPAs can’t be good advocates for their clients. In fact we know many that are and in fact that technical accounting background plays very well in a sales tax audit because oftentimes the sales tax auditor has their own background in accounting, but you want to make sure that there’s an advocacy component of it because knowing the sales tax law isn’t everything. The knowledge of tax procedure in a sales tax audit is really critical to success in the audit. You want to have a representative that can not only handle the audit, but can handle any subsequent appeals, that can deal with the settlement section of CDTFA or who can go litigate the case at the office of tax appeals in California. If absolutely necessary, because of this, most CPAs that I know that do sales tax audits are only limited to the audit level and while they do a very fine job,
I think the client is better served in a lot of situations, particularly when there’s any risk involved, by having somebody who’s more comfortable at the higher levels and can provide a much broader representation of the client. By far the biggest successes that we’ve had in the appeals process are those audits that we’ve handled initially, because we’re able to load the record at the audit level with things that are going to help us later in Appeals. Whenever we do a sales tax audit as a firm, we’re constantly building the record and putting information in there that we know we’re going to have success on either at the settlement level or the Appeals level. If you don’t have familiarity with the highest levels of the process it’s really hard to do that during the course of the audit.
Topic: Why Should I Hire Brotman Law to Defend Me in My IRS Audit?
We have a long track record of successfully defending our clients in IRS audits.
We’ve got a really good measure of technical skill at the firm and can deal with things that are extremely complex.
We have a long track record of successfully defending our clients in IRS audits. We’ve got a really good measure of technical skill at the firm and can deal with things that are extremely complex. We can make simple audits go away very quickly. Even if I don’t have any magic beans in my desk and I can’t make your liability just magically disappear, the strategy and the thought and effort that we put in and the preparation work tends to yield very positive results for our clients. We’re very comfortable moving through the tax procedure chain and dealing with IRS examination at all levels. There’s a certain strategy to an audit because the audit and a tax return will ultimately tell a story and the question that you have to ask yourself is who’s going to tell that story. If you get out in front of an audit and you put the investment into the preparation, you can usually save yourself a lot of time, money and headache and mitigate any penalties that are associated with the audit. Now obviously that’s on a case-by-case basis, but we have a long track record of results. We’re really good at advocating on our client’s behalf and we’re really good at getting people out of audits for less liability than they would have going in it by themselves.
We are pleased to announce that Brotman Law, a San Diego tax law firm, has been named a 2018 Law Firm 500 Honoree awarded to the Fastest Growing Law Firms in the U.S.
Brotman Law is ranked 14th on the 2018 Law Firm 500, and has grown 693 percent.
“I think it is a major testament to what we do here, and it just validates the hard work that our firm does on a daily basis,” Sam Brotman, founder and owner of Brotman Law, said.
Aside from these differences, liens and levies are remarkably similar in most other respects.
Liens and levies are filed by the federal and state tax authorities when you neglect or refuse to pay a tax bill you have received from these agencies.
The IRS usually files liens with the county recorder or the clerk of courts in your county of residence or where your property is located. A lien filed by the FTB is against any property you own in California.
Taxpayers often confuse the terms tax lien and tax levy and do not understand the difference in actions represented by these concepts. While liens and levies can both be filed by the IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) and there are many similarities to when they are issued and how they can be removed, liens and levies are terms for very different actions.
The success or failure of the Dodd-Frank Act will be ultimately judged by history and the impact that it has with combatting some of the problems that have existed with credit rating agencies both before and after the financial crisis of 2008. Already critics have been quick to condemn the act for the perceived over burden that it places on the credit rating agencies or for what others feel is too little regulation that does too little to prevent the evils of the past four decades. Through the research and analysis involved with paper, however, we have come to several conclusions about how the law can be made more effective or where potential shortcomings exist despite its overall intent to promote fairer dealing and more transparency among the agencies.
Key Takeaways
Topic: Conclusions about CRA and Dodd-Frank
The success or failure of the Dodd-Frank Act will be ultimately judged by history and the impact that it has with combatting some of the problems that have existed with credit r….
Already critics have been quick to condemn the act for the perceived over burden that it places on the credit rating agencies or for what others feel is too little regulation th….
Effects of the Dodd-Frank Act on Conflicts of Interest
Key Takeaways
If any employee of an issuer, underwriter, or sponsor of a security…had previously been employed by the NRSRO and participated in determining the credit rating of that entity during the one year pe…
By implementing this look-back requirement, the bill seeks to eliminate conflicts of interests by closing the ‘revolving door’ that exists between NRSROs and the agencies which they provide ratings…
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In addition to administering rating and disclosure rules, The Dodd-Frank Act also imposes several requirements on NRSROs to establish internal control systems that prevents conflicts of interest. The bill’s drafters made it a priority to put certain guidelines in place in order to mitigate the temptation toward favoritism within the rating agencies. Without the conflicts, or with the proper steps to mitigate them, the rationale is that more certainty would exist about the objectivity of the ratings.
Addressing Credit Rating Agencies Through Enactment of Dodd-Frank
Key Takeaways
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[1] “BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE DODD-FRANK WALL STREET REFORM AND CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT”.
[2] “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: Credit Rating Agency Provisions.” http://www.orrick.com/fileupload/2822.htm .
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank Act”) was passed and signed into on July 21, 2010. A small part of this act addressed credit rating agencies and their past practices. The act intends to (1) remove references in statutes and regulations to Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (“NRSROs”), (2) create a new office of credit ratings, (3) to expand conditions that deal with conflicts of interest that may exist both inside the credit rating agencies and with the issuers and underwriters that they deal with, (4) promote rules for better internal governance and control, (5) define new requirements for the board of directors, and (6) institute harsher consequences for non-compliance with the law.[1]
