In the last five years, 22 Los Angeles companies, 2 San Diego ones and a total of 7 Orange County tax resolution companies went out of business! That's 31 companies in five years! What the heck?!
Why is this so? We think the reason for So Cal's bad reputation and bad DNA in tax relief started with a bad style of practices that took root in Southern California in the 90's.
In the late '90's, American Tax Relief rose to be one of the biggest tax relief companies in the U.S.. ATR was started by an aggressive enterpreneur named Alex Hahn. ATR grew quickly and developed a poor service but successful sales model. He hired aggressive sales-people some of them who had roots in selling oil-gas partnerships (often fraudulent) from the '80's. ATR had a good run of it UNTIL they were closed by the FTC. $15 millions in assets were liquidated to pay their customers from Mr. Hahn's assets. He was banned from the industry and telemarketing as well.
ATR may have went away, BUT their sales people did NOT. WE think that of the 30 companies that went kaput in the last 5 years - many of these fly-by-night companies were started by these ex-ATR salespeople. And...that's our explanation of why Southern Cal has developed such a bad reputation for tax relief companies.
You can read more about So Cal tax relief in past articles HERE AND HERE
