Category: Operate A More Efficient Tax Firm

It’s one of the most critical questions in the tax resolution industry: To accept or not to accept client payment plans for fees.

I’ve written quite a bit about fee structures and payment arrangements, and this morning Danny sent me an email with several questions pertaining this topic:

How many months do you allow someone to pay? What sort of upfront fee do you collect? Do you use an online auto bill to their credit card? Do you have a written agreement and do you file the agreement?

Let me first start with this: I no longer offer payment plans to clients, and I advise other solo practitioners not to, either. My stance is that if a client wants my help, and cannot pay my full fee up front, then that client does not meet my established criteria for my ideal clients. When you are a solo practitioner in particular, you should set fairly strict criteria regarding the clients you will work with. When it’s only you, you should be far less willing to deal with problem clients, and you don’t have to.

Please note that this entire article really applies to those doing flat-fee client work (aka, value billing). If you are billing hourly against a retainer, then most of this will not apply to you, because these tips are sort of built in to the retainer model.

With that said, if you either choose to accept payment plans from clients, or own a larger firm and are going after the volume angle in order to compete on the playing field with the large national firms (which is perfectly OK, of course), then you should set strict guidelines regarding your fee payment arrangements.

First of all, collect as much of the fee up front as possible. Never go for a series of equal payments over time — always insist on the first payment being significantly larger. The reason for this should be obvious: Tax resolution work is heavily front-loaded in terms of your time commitment to the client. It’s not uncommon for half your billable hours on a tax resolution case to occur within the first week of a client hiring you. Collect enough in the initial payment to cover this work.

Second, whatever payment arrangements you do make, automate it. In other words, set up the payments on automatically recurring ACH drafts or credit card drafts, so that you don’t even have … Continue reading

Today’s message is one of the shortest that I’ll ever send you, and it involves adding a tremendous efficiency level to your tax resolution practice: Hiring and training an administrative assistant.

If you are a solo practitioner and have never had an assistant before, I would encourage you to consider hiring one. This is one of the tips that we’ll be covering in the Tax Practice Success Automation webinars, in the section on delegating certain tasks to other people to allow you to accomplish more.

When you hire an assistant, there is going to be a learning curve, because tax resolution admin tasks aren’t taught at paralegal schools or in retail tax preparation courses. Therefore, you need an organized approach for training this new person. Doing so is worth your time, because ultimately it will allow you to carry a much larger case load, which means making more money.

Here is an example tax resolution paralegal assistant training program outline that you can adapt within your practice. I would suggest going through this training with new personnel in short sessions, one or two hours each. If you have purchased the Tax Resolution Mastery Course, then you can have your assistant go through the applicable portions of that course as well. Since that material is intended for licensed professionals, encourage your assistant to write down a list of questions they have as they go through those audio and video presentations, and answer those questions for them to catch them up to speed.

Download Example Paralegal Training Program Outline

I’m putting a lot of time this week into finishing additional modules for some of our courses, as well as working on the latest round of re-writes for The Tax Resolution Sales Handbook.

I’m very excited about the next few months, and am thankful that I have the opportunity to share with you the journey of growing our tax practices. Happy Thanksgiving!… Continue reading

It’s been a wild ride for the past two years in the magical land of Taxlandia.

We’ve seen shifting IRS enforcement priorities, endless debate about the Bush-era tax cuts, burdensome new reporting requirements, and the dawn of IRS oversight of non-U.S. financial institutions with the passage of FATCA. Who would have thought we’d see a day where Swiss banks lifted the secrecy provisions they’ve maintained for eons, let alone see the devaluation of the Swiss franc?

We’ve seen five European nations declare the insolvency of their financial systems. Here at home, we’ve enacted an individual health care mandate that will be enforced through the IRC, and operated our Federal government without a firm budget solution for two entire fiscal years now.

In tax resolution, we’ve witnessed the bankruptcy or regulatory shutdown of the five largest national tax resolution companies, creating massive market opportunity for smaller firms. The IRS has expanded streamline resolution criteria, and fixed what I considered to be the most egregious flaw in the Offer in Compromise program, the remaining income multiplier for calculating RCP. Who would have guessed that they would ever actually fix that problem?

On the marketing side of things, we’ve seen the debt settlement provisions added to the Telemarketing Sales Rules, which gave us all momentary pause until the temporary exclusion of tax debt settlement was announced, but which still leaves many people asking questions since it’s not really settled yet.

When James and I first sat down two years ago to create a web-based platform for cost effectively delivering tax lien sales leads to tax practitioners, the TSR debt settlement provisions hadn’t been announced. The month we went live with this web site, the provisions came into force, causing a slight shift in our own long range business plan.

Acknowledging that change is inevitable is healthy. Looking to the future, what sort of changes can we expect to see that directly impact those of us that make our living through tax services?

This year’s PTIN requirement already eliminated tens of thousands of tax preparers from completing returns, and the examination requirement for next year will thin those numbers even more. I see this as nothing but a good thing for licensed professionals.

We have yet to see any enforcement at all of illegal telemarketing by unlicensed salespeople, but I think that is very soon to change. And yes, it is illegal for an unlicensed person to telemarket to … Continue reading