Q: How do I know if I am being enticed into a tax shelter scheme involving either fraud or negligence?
A: The typical scenario involves one or two persons who have started a business from scratch, been successful in building it up over the years, and have sold it to a third party for a significant profit. These persons face a very large capital gains liability because their tax basis is quite low, having started out with virtually nothing in the business. Their private banker at a Big Bank refers them to one of the Big Four Accounting Firms. They in turn get a 35 to 50 page legal opinion that is actually canned and not unique to the customer. The legal opinion says that the tax shelter scheme is perfectly all right under the Internal Revenue Code. At this point the business person provides a large sum of money (ranging from $200,000 to $6,000,000) to the investment advisor firm that is working with the Big Four Accounting Firm. This money is then transferred overseas to buy ownership of a brand new “shell” business, often in the Cayman Islands, with a name similar to the business that has just been sold. It is explained to the customer that business losses of the new overseas corporation will become deductible through some tax mechanism to the customer and offset the capital gains liability. The banker at the Big Bank, the accountant at the Big Four Accounting Firm, the lawyer at the Big Law Firm, and the stock broker at the investment advisory firm will all take a cut of the money the customer puts up. What experience has proven is that the Internal Revenue Service disallows virtually all of these tax shelters, with the result that the customer winds up paying the full amount of taxes that he or she originally expected to pay but now there are also tax penalties and interest due on top of that.

Q: What will I need to know if I have been caught up in one of these tax shelter schemes?
A: You will already know because you have been sent a letter by the I.R.S., or your tax advisor will let you know that your tax shelter has been disallowed.

Q: What will I need to provide to my lawyer?
A: This office will need to see all of the documentation presented to the customer by each of the persons at the bank, accounting firm, law firm, and investment advisory firm. If there were regular statements from a stock brokerage company or from the overseas shell business, these need to be gathered together and brought to the lawyer also.

Q: What would the attorney fee be for this type of case?
A: This office has handled cases on behalf of victimized business people in one of three ways: (1) A normal contingency fee arrangement, where a percentage of the money received by settlement or collected after verdict or settlement, plus reimbursement of expenses of litigation in cost; (2) A normal hourly rate, plus reimbursement of expenses of litigation and costs; (3) A reduced contingency fee combined with a reduced hourly rate, as well as reimbursement of expenses of litigation and costs. Which of these three choices is made follows a meeting between the lawyer and the client here in the office.