THE CLIENT COMES FIRST…
Paul Levine
Commercial Real Estate Advisor and Managing Member @ LS Property Partners LLC| Retired CPA with over 50 years of income tax experience that no other Commercial Realtor has, Income Tax Consultant and unmatched Creatively!
THE CLIENT COMES FIRST…
AND THAT’S HOW WE WORK…
PART II OF III…
THIS WAS AN AMAZING EXPERIENCE BUT I’M NOT DONE!!!
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About 3 or 4 weeks after the sale occurred, I got a phone call from the Head Corporate Counsel from Du Pont telling me that my client had to pay $250,000 in income taxes because the wife bought some stock during a certain period during the sale. It is called Phantom Income and he was right. So, I asked him if I could call him back and he said yes. I got off the phone and immediately called my client. I told him the situation and my last words with him were “Can I Play?”. He said yes. By the way I had a wonderful relationship with this client. We were friends as well as being client and accountant. He knew exactly what I meant when I said, "Can I Play"!!! Another point, during the negotiations it was me and him on one side of the table and four gentlemen from DuPont on the other side of the table. My client hardly spoke, I did the negotiating.
So, I called the gentleman from Du Pont back and told him that I was not going to pick up the income. I WAS going to pick up the income because I would never, I said NEVER, sign an income tax return as the paid preparer that was a quarter of a million dollars short in the tax, but he didn’t know that!!! He said that I had to, and I said that I wouldn’t. We did that about three times and then I asked him if he knows what it sounds like when a phone hangs up, and I hung up on him. Yes, I really did that.
He called me back about 3 or 4 weeks later and told me that I had to pick up this phantom income and I told him that I wasn’t going to. We danced around that about 3 or 4 times and then I asked him if he remembered how we ended the last phone call, and I hung up on him again. Yes, I really did!!!