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advancetaxreliefexperts · 2 years

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CAN’T PAY YOUR TAX DEBT IN FULL? YOUR POSSIBLE OPTIONS?

If you’re unable to pay your tax debt, it’s important that you still file on time, or ask for an extension to file. Those who cannot pay at least 90% of their tax debt by the original deadline will typically be subject to penalties.

The longer it takes you to file and pay, the more penalties you’ll accrue—but how are you supposed to pay off a bill that continues to rise? There are a few ways to avoid excessive penalties. An Advance Tax Relief expert can help you explore one of the following solutions: Pay with a credit card: If you don’t have the money to pay for your tax debt currently, you can choose to put in on a credit card. At its core, this is essentially trading one debt for another, but choosing the right credit company could help you pay less in the long run, as you can likely qualify for an interest rate that costs less than the penalties the IRS will enforce.

NEED HELP WITH AN OFFER IN COMPROMISE, TAX DEBT HELP, TAX PREPARATION, AUDIT REPRESENTATION OR STOP WAGE GARNISHMENTS?

ADVANCE TAX RELIEF LLC Call (713)300-3965 www.advancetaxrelief.com BBB A+ RATED

Offer in Compromise: If it’s apparent that you’ll never be able to pay your total tax debt, the IRS may agree to an Offer in Compromise (OIC). This solution requires the taxpayer to come up with a new balance; if the IRS agrees to this offer, the remainder of your balance (anything more than the new number you’ve agreed upon) is forgiven.

In order to qualify for an Offer in Compromise, you must continue to make payments on your debt while the IRS considers your request. If not, the OIC will be denied. You can apply for an OIC with Form 656-B, which comes with a $186 application fee (if your income is below the specified poverty level, this application fee may be waived).

You’ll also be required to detail important financial information using one of two types of Collection Information Statement: Form 433-A (for individuals) or Form 433-B (for businesses). If you’re currently married and live in a community property state, you may be required to provide detailed data on your spouse. The information flow doesn’t stop at these forms. The IRS will also take a deep look into your financial records, including vehicle registrations, bank records, pay stubs, and anything else they may deem important for their decision-making process. It’s not uncommon for taxpayers to submit stacks upon stacks of paperwork for IRS review, and you may need to dig through scores of past financial statements—not unlike preparing for an IRS audit.

The IRS uses this information in order to determine your reasonable collection potential. The offer you make must equal the net realizable value of your assets along with your excess monthly income (the amount left over after your monthly necessary expenses are subtracted from your monthly total income).

Keep in mind that what the IRS deems as a “necessary expense” could be much different than your definition. If you don’t receive approval, this paperwork gives the IRS all it needs to come after you quickly for collection after the negotiation process has ceased. It’s also important to keep in mind that interest continues to accrue during the negotiation; if your request is denied, you’ll end up owing more than you did previously. These potential consequences make it crucial for you to create and submit a realistic offer in compromise request that is likely to be approved.

There are typically three instances in which the IRS will approve an OIC request: When there is reasonable doubt that the tax debt owed is incorrect When there is doubt you could ever hope to pay off your debt in full When paying the total amount due would cause undue financial hardship

It’s difficult to get approval for an Offer in Compromise, and it’s important to work with a qualified tax professional to create a realistic solution that works for both you and the government agency. Contact the professionals at Community Tax to discover the ways we may be able to effectively submit an OIC that can settle your outstanding tax balance.

Installment Agreements: If you can’t currently pay off your tax debt in full and would like to receive more time, the IRS may approve your request for an installment agreement.

You can apply for one of these agreements with Form 9465 Installment Agreement Request, which is used to ask the IRS for a monthly payment plan that will allow you to pay off what you owe in a pre-specified amount of time. To qualify, your total tax debt must be less than $50,000, and you must be able to pay off your balance within 72 months. This is most often used when paying old tax debt but could be useful in failure-to-file situations that have caused your total balance to skyrocket due to penalties and interest. However, therein lies the stipulation: the IRS will not accept an Installment Agreement Request if you’re not up to date on all current tax filings, so submitting your tax return is the first step. While the IRS assesses your application, you must make the payments as set out in your request and you must file all taxes on time in the future; if you fail to do so, the installment agreement can be revoked and the IRS can come after you for the original tax debt owed. We have a team of dedicated experts skilled in negotiating installment agreements with the government.

We can guarantee that your tax filing status is up to date and create a plan with provisions that suit your financial needs while appeasing the IRS to help you avoid further penalties and costs.

Filing for Bankruptcy: This is typically a last-ditch effort for taxpayers in difficult financial straits and should only be considered as a last resort.

Only certain tax debts can be wiped out. If the following conditions are true of your tax debt, you may be able to discharge your debt with Chapter 7 Bankruptcy filing. Always speak to a tax professional or accountant before filing for bankruptcy. This action can have lasting ramifications and it’s important to consider all available routes before deciding on bankruptcy.

Here are some considerations to bear in mind:

It’s been 240 days: The IRS must have assessed your income tax debt 240 days before you file a petition for bankruptcy. However, this time limit can be extended if the IRS suspended collections due to installment agreements, currently uncollectible status, or Offer in Compromise filings. In some cases, you may be able to file for bankruptcy if the IRS has yet to assess your debt.

Your debt is three years old: You can only discharge tax debt through bankruptcy if your tax return was due at least three years prior.

You’ve filed your tax return: You must file a tax return for the debt you wish to discharge at least two years before filing for bankruptcy. As you can see, the penalties for filing taxes late are long-spanning and could affect your financial options for years. You didn’t commit fraud or evasion: If you filed a fraudulent return or you attempted to avoid paying your taxes, you cannot file for bankruptcy.

Your tax debt is income taxes: Any other taxes—like fraud penalties or payroll taxes—can’t be solved with bankruptcy.

If you’re unsure which of these solutions best suits your needs, contact the team of tax resolution specialists at Advance Tax Relief. We’re well versed in IRS negotiations, and can help you create a plan to settle your debt and make your necessary payments in the quickest time frame possible. If you are facing wage garnishment, call today (713)300-3965 for a free consultation!

Seeking professional help when handling back taxes can help you avoid the discussed errors. At Advance Tax Relief, we offer specialized tax resolution services to help you deal with IRS debt.

Our experts can help rectify erroneous tax bills and guide you in picking a suitable repayment program. Contact us today (713)300-3965 for back tax filing and tax relief services.

Advance Tax Relief is rated one of the best tax relief companies nationwide.

#FreshStartInitiative #OfferInCompromise #TaxPreparation #TaxAttorneys #TaxDebtRelief #TaxHelp #BestTaxReliefCompanies #TaxRelief

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brucegivner · 2 years

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Income Tax Planning Considerations

There are three basic types of taxes, and the ability to plan with them is different.

Estate taxes are voluntary. We can eliminate the estate tax whether the estate is $10 million; $100 million; or $1 billion.

Capital gains taxes are more difficult with which to deal. However, there are at least a dozen ways to reduce, defer or eliminate capital gains taxes. The most important element is timing. We want someone to come to us more than two years before a sale of that person's business or building. If not, then at least one year in advance. If that person comes to us in the same year as the sale, there are things we can do. However, they are not as attractive or conservative.

Ordinary income tax planning is the most difficult of the three. There are few ways to eliminate the tax on ordinary income. There are many was to reduce or defer it. However, these ways are difficult and, usually, can only impact a portion of your ordinary income tax.

The taxing agencies (federal and state) have significant tools to attack ordinary income tax planning. There are certain "doctrines" they can use to challenge a transaction even if the taxpayer did everything correctly!!! Those doctrines go by various names, e.g., the step-transaction doctrine; the substance over form doctrine; the lack of business purpose doctrine, among others.

Also, the taxing agencies can assert significant penalties if they don't like your planning. First is the 20% accuracy-related penalty. It applies if your understatement of tax is greater than the greater of (1) 10% of the tax that should have been shown on the return or (ii) $5,000. Assume your return showed a $100,000 income tax obligation. On audit, the IRS indicates you really owe $150,000. The extra $50,000 is greater than (i) 10% of the tax shown on your return or (ii) $5,000. As a result, your penalty is $50,000 X 20% = $10,000. Since that is not deductible, if you are in the state and federal 50% tax bracket, you must earn $20,000 to pay the $10,000 penalty. You will also owe non-deductible interest for every year back to the date you filed your return.

There is also a 40% lack of economic substance doctrine penalty for specific situations!

Income tax planning is different for different people. If you own a closely held business, you have more flexibility. That is because there are structures, such as a defined benefit pension plan, your business can adopt which can significantly reduce your personal income tax obligation. If you are an employee of a business you do not control, you can take advantage of programs your employer sponsors, such as a Section 401(k) plan which allows voluntary contributions and, hopefully, one forwhich the employer matches your contributions.

Tax planning analyzes a financial situation to ensure all elements work harmoniously to allow you to pay the lowest legal taxes possible. It should form an essential part of your financial plan.

The process entails making financial decisions to minimize taxes by optimally using tax benefits, rebates, and exemptions as much as possible. Tax planning gives you an overview of your finances and tax obligations at the beginning of the fiscal year rather than rushing to set things straight at the end of the year.

Sound tax planning starts with gathering reliable financial data. It's, therefore, important to keep tabs on all your revenues and expenses and reconcile your bank and credit card statements regularly. Planning will help you file accurate annual tax returns and avoid potential processing hitches that could delay your tax refund.

Whether saving for retirement or investment purposes, financial and tax planning can help you structure and make the most of your available allowances in a tax-efficient way. A tax-efficient plan minimizes how much taxes you pay.

So, tax planning considerations would typically include the amount of your income, the timing of income, the timing of purchases, and other expenditures. Also, your selection of investments and retirement plans must complement your tax filing status to create the best possible tax outcomes. For example, high-net-worth individuals require an in-depth understanding of their financial situation.

Tax planning should not be a once-a-year activity. Your tax strategies must be reassessed regularly. It calls for constant monitoring of the economic environment, new legislation, evolving tax regimes, and changing personal financial positions.

Deferring your income (and bonuses) is a good, but may not be an easy, tax planning strategy, it's a good move, so long as your employer allows it. You may have more leeway with deferred revenue if you are a freelancer, consultant, or self-employed.

To make it worthwhile, income or revenue deferral should only be pursued if you think you will be in a lower or the same tax bracket the next year. You don't want to receive a bigger tax bill in the coming year if your additional income pushes you into a higher tax bracket.

Similar to deferring income, you might lower your tax bill by accelerating deductions. Contributing to charity, for example, is a great and legal way to get a tax deduction. When you make charitable contributions to qualified causes or organizations, you get tax relief or tax credits.

#Bruce Givner #Income Tax Planning

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t-o-m-hollands · 4 years

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A/N: Cointens violence and mentions of injuries, war and blood. Also swearing and drinking. Smut in future parts, nothing in this.

“It seemed like a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in.”

― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

When Tom’s grandfather passes away, he inherits an office in the middle of a buzzling London. He has no idea what to do with it.

The year is 1947 and Tom is restless after the war. After a chance meeting with his old comrade Harrison and a drunken lunch at the local pub they decide to open up a detective agency. After finding you huddled up in a library while chasing an unwilling witness Tom decides to hire you as the agency’s secretary. You, reluctantly, take up the offer from the charming stranger.

Together the three of you face some of London’s most hard-boiled criminals and lethal femme fatales.

You have to navigate your way through adulthood, life after war and your growing feelings for your boss.

***

The pub was unusually crammed with people, workers meeting up with each other for a pint before heading home to their families. He could see them through the muted windows, cheering and laughing, pints of beer clutched in their hands. Now, it certainly wasn’t the nicest pub in London, a thick cover of mud covered the floor, the walls were so dirty that it was hard to tell what the original wallpaper had looked like. But then again, it was the Bugle, a pub well hidden in the Shafto Mews in London. It was not a pub you just happened to stroll in to, looking for a place to eat or a friendly place to catch up with a long-lost comrade in. It was a seedy and dirty place, where the beers came cheap and the brawls started easy.

The barman, a Mr. Eric Brew, was a brusque and quick-tempered elderly man with a beer belly so large it made it hard for him to steer his way through the many bottles and glasses behind the bar. Luckily for him it was unusual for anyone to ordered anything other than a pint or perhaps a glass of cheap and watered-down whiskey.

Tom loved this place, because no one ever bothered him here. This was not a place to talk to strangers in.

On this particular autumn afternoon the air outside was crisp and full of the smell of pavement after rain, it smelled of London. Currently though the sky was bluer than it had been all summer and the leaves on the trees had just started to change their colours. There was a distinct chill in the air. Tom shivered in his dress shirt, thinking to himself that this was sure to be the last time that year he’d get away with not wearing a jacket.

As he stepped inside, he exchanged the almost impossible fresh autumn air for a cigarette smoke fog. It was unusually busy for a Tuesday afternoon, and the sound of loud voices and clinking glasses filled the air. Tom gathered it must be payday. It was long ago that he stopped to bother about the days of the week or when pay was due. Not because of an abundance of money but for the lack of a steady job.

Walking up the bar he told Eric to pour the usual and handed him a coin. Eric grunted and started to pour into a glass that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in months.

“Busy today, mate” Tom stated. Eric grunted again and handed him his drink.

As Tom sat down in the far, and well hidden, corner of the pub he thought to himself that his so-called conversation with the barman had been his longest conversation in days. After the war had ended, he’d stayed out in France, despite his mother’s letters begging him to come home he hadn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t miss his family, on the contrary, being apart from them felt more torturous than anything he’d lived through during the war.

Still, he thought as he gulped down on his drink, he had been through war, and that does change a person. He wasn’t the same care-free boy who’d so gladly enlisted, desperate for some preconceived idea that the war would satisfy his deep-rooted need for adventure, to please his longing for glory. He’d happily waved his younger brothers and his parents goodbye on the platform, surrounded by sad looking boys saying farewells to their loved ones.

The war had not given him what he wanted. There had been no glory or sense of adventure. And even though the worst injury he’d suffer was a broken nose that had more to do with his own stupidity than actual fighting he had still seen the suffering of others. Walked through villages so bombed there was nothing, no human nor animal left. Nothing but ruin and corpses left to rot. He’d seen the torn apart remains of what had once been children on the street. He had had to breath trough the smell of decaying flesh as they walked by. He had lost friends and comrades.

The war had changed him, and he still wasn’t sure if it was for better or worse. All he knew was that he couldn’t face his father, or his mother. Not yet. He thought of his little brothers, how much five years must have changed them. He quietly wondered if he’d recognise them if he passed them on the streets today. He tried to convince himself that he would, and only after half a bottle of whiskey did he feel brave enough to admit it to himself that he probably wouldn’t. Too long had passed.

The only reason he had come back to England at all was for a surprise visit from a solicitor, who had tracked him down somewhere outside of Cannes, informing him of the passing of his grandfather. Tom had few memories of said grandfather What he could recall was a fearsome and stern figure, Victorian in his manner. Tom could remember looking up to the damn near giant as he looked down at Tom with disapproval written all over his face as Tom stood in front of a broken vase, he’d accidentally shattered while chasing the cat. It certainly had not been a man fond of children. Tom had always kept his distance from the man whenever they had visited, scared of the scolding the older man was more than capable of.

Therefore, it had been, to say the least, a great surprise when said grandfather had left his entire inheritance to his oldest grandson.

Sure, there hadn’t been a lot of actual money, not after all the death-duties and inheritance taxes had gone through, but he’d gotten his office and the apartment above it, placed bang on one of the busiest streets of London. What his grandfather had used the office for he had no idea, and the solicitors refused to tell him anything about is grandfathers’ dealings, but judging by the state of the place it must have been an awfully long time since anyone sat their foot in the place, probably not since before the war, the first one. The entire place was, like this very pub, filled with dirt and dust and long abandoned forgotten things. Most of which was nothing more than trash, a chair that surely would break as soon as anyone sat down on it, a desk with one broken leg and a filing cabinet full of mouldy documents.

The only distinctive feature was a rather well-made painting. Not only was the portrait of the young lady striking, but the gold frame surrounding it was solid gold. Something that had chocked Tom greatly. For he had never seen anything look quite so out of place than that gold framed picture of a young, beautiful women with seemingly shining eyes –

“Surely it can’t be – Tom Holland, OI! Tom!”

Tom instinctively looked up, only to meet the eyes of a dearly beloved friend.

“Mate! As I live and breathe!”

“Where have you been, buddy?” Harrison happily exclaimed, pulling out the chair opposite of Tom and before pretty much falling down on it, a pint of beer in hand and a massive grin on his face.

“I haven’t seen you since Monte Cassino– ” he silenced himself. Maybe because of the look in Tom’s eyes, maybe because of memories of his own.

(I haven’t seen you since the war, I haven’t seen you since we were crying in the bunkers, thinking we would die. Hoping that we would. Hoping that we wouldn’t.)

“Yeah” is all Tom can manage to get out, lungs suddenly feeling too tight.

They both take large gulps from their glasses, avoiding the others eye.

“So how you’ve been, mate?” Harrison asks, sounding more mellow now, less cheerful.

“It’s been good, bud” Tom says, trying to sound happy, trying to raise the mood a little. He can see the dark clouds of the war in Harrisons eyes, can see it clear as day even in this smoke-filled, god forsaken pub. It’s still haunting him. And he doesn’t quite know what else to say, doesn’t know how to voice the fact that he himself is hardly sleeping anymore, that he spent two years in France living as a wanderer and picking up odd jobs wherever he could find them, not even trying to pick up the pieces from the past. Not knowing where to begin

(At home, the part of him that’s braver than the rest seem to always whisper. Start at home and build from there.)

“Yeah?” There’s a note of hope in Harrison’s voice and as he looks at him the clouds in his eyes seem to clear, if only a little, and Tom’s heart breaks for his old friend. He knows that desperation, saw it all over France in the soldier's eyes. A desperate longing for proof that there was something good in the world, even after everything that had been done.

“Yes, mate! It’s been grand. I came into an inheritance and all!” And upon seeing the look of pure surprise in Harrisons now cloud-free face Tom bursts into genuine laughter, not caring to think about how long ago it had been since he had made a whole-hearted, genuine laughter.

“Alright, let’s order some food and then let’s catch up, yeah?”

And they did. The food at The Bugle was awful. Tom knew this, since coming back to London he’d drink away his consciousness in this pub and once or twice he had given in and ordered what The Bugle’s chef referred to as food. He knew this but did not care, for the company was excellent.

It turned out Harrison had come home immediately after the war. Had tried to pick up the pieces from before. He met up with his old friends (the ones that’d survived), he dated a different girl every week, unable to settle and now lived in his parent’s townhouse in Belgravia while they spent most of their time on the family estate out in Norfolk. He too was currently out of a job, however the difference was that Harrison had no need for work, the allowance his parents gave him and his own grandparents inheritance (which, although Tom never asked, but presumed) far exceeded his own.

Tom sensed that Harrison, just like himself, felt a deeply-rooted restlessness since coming home. It was in the way his left leg wouldn’t stop tapping, his regular glances around the room, in the way he just shovelled the food around his plate, not eating much.

Tom in return told him, although with far less detail than his friend had given, of staying out in France, of a surprise visit by the solicitors. He told him of the abandoned office and apartment he now was the owner of. He even told him of the portrait hanging above the broken desk.

They talked about old times, of old friends and past lovers, and every time the name of one of those comrades that didn’t make it to the end of the war was mentioned an awkward silence spread between them before the other one quickly started a new story.

(Harrison noticed that Tom never mentioned his parents, or his brothers. Not once. But he doesn’t say anything. He think they’ll get to that eventually.)

A loud crashing breaks their conversation and both Harrison and Tom are on their feet before either one of them has even registered where the sound came from.

“YOU FUCKING SWINE, I’LL GIVE YOU NOTHING!” The screeching, and surprisingly high-pitched voice, comes from Eric the barman, who’s standing arms raised above his head behind the bar. A young man, not even wearing anything to mask his face, is holding a revolver and pointing it right at Eric’s chest.

Before he’s even fully comprehended what he’s doing he’s halfway across the pub, people scattering out of his way, and out of the robbers aim. He can sense Harrison’s presence right behind him and then they’ve both tackled the young man to the ground. All Tom can think about is to get his hands on the man’s revolver, so that he can secure it. He sees how Harrison tries to get a hold of the young robbers’ arms as he’s waving them around, trying to fight them both at once. Unfortunately, he gets in a lucky swing that hits Tom right over his nose, a nose that’s already been broken once, and blood gushes out. The man looks surprised by this, partly because of the sudden stream of blood falling over him and partly because he actually just hit someone. Tom quickly uses this for his advantage and dives down for the revolver as Harrison secures the burglar’s arms behind his back.

They manage to hold him down until the police comes. They give them a quick rundown of what happened. Eric, furious and face alarmingly red, fills in when he manages to find words, shaking from fury. One of the policemen offer to drive Tom to the hospital to have his nose looked at but he refuses. Then they ask if he’d like to press charges. Tom takes one quick look at the young man now sitting in a police car and shakes his head. The boy, for on closer inspection he’s nothing more than a boy, looks terrified, and honestly, he’s already in enough trouble with the law. During the past few years crime in London has been on the rise. Young and restless men all coming home from the war, looking for jobs where there are none and haunted from memories from the battlefields. It’s no wonder there’s desperation in the air.

So, Tom and Haz walks away, leaving the two police cars and its officers, a furious pub owner with an unexpectedly high-pitched voice, and an entire pub of people with their noses pressed up against its foggy windows.

As they walk, without discussing where they’re going, Tom suddenly bursts out in laughter. He doesn’t know why, but the restlessness that’s done nothing short but haunted him for years now has suddenly vanished. There’s a pause and then Harrison joins in and Tom knows, knows that he feels the same. That this sudden rush of adrenalin was just what he needed too.

They practically double over with laughter, leaning on the other to keep upright and when they finally stop a comfortable silence fill the quiet as they walk on.

Before long, and before having reflected on where his feet are leading him, they’re standing outside of 15 Sloane street.

“Is this it?” Harrison asks, voice filled with curiosity as he looks up at the red-bricked building.

“Yeah” is all Tom manage to get out as an answer. Because suddenly he feels almost shy, like he’s showing Harrison some long kept secret. And for a moment they just stand and admire the building. “Can I look inside?” Haz asks, curiosity colouring his every word. So, Tom unlocks the door and they step inside.

Inside the air feels heavy, not like in the pub where it had been full of smoke, but instead it feels old, and if it hadn’t been so damn cold outside Tom would have opened up the windows.

The ground is as covered in mud and dust and dirt as the pubs floor. The walls look dull too. But the space is good, a large foyer to receive visitors, a guest bathroom, an office, a kitchen and a staff bathroom too.

“So” Harrison finally says, having taken in the place in silence. “What are you going to do with it?”

And Tom doesn’t know what to say because honestly – is that not just the question that’s frequently been on his mind since he first got here. “Dunno” ha answers lamely. “I suppose,” he starts but stops himself, feeling too embarrassed at his childish idea.

“What?” Haz encourages.

“Well” Tom begins, and then before he loses his gut he rambles out “It would be cool to be a detective though, wouldn’t it?” He doesn’t look at his old friend as he says this. He should though, because he misses out on the massive grin spreading across Harrison’s face.

“Oh totally!” He all but yells. “Like Sherlock Holmes, or Phillip Marlowe?”

“Phillip Marlowe, surely!” Tom responds, finally looking at his old comrade. He feels light as air, having finally put words on a wish that’s long been on his mind.

But now Haz looks awkwardly down, down on his well-polished, hand-made shoes and the muddy ground. “What?” Tom asks, worry threatening to blow his happy bubble.

“Look, you don’t have to, it’s just, like if you don’t want it or you find me lacking you could just sack me bu–“

“Of course, you’ll join me” Tom interrupts Harrisons awkward attempt at asking to work with him. “Really?” He asks, eyes gleaming with happiness. “You, ‘course mate, wouldn’t wanna do it without you”.

***

And so, it begins.

They start with trying to make the place habitable. After all, the office space needs to be a presentable enough environment for clients to feel comfortable to share their troubles with them and preferably the apartment above needs to be clean enough for Tom to live in without contracting a disease. It’s hard work, and Harrison loudly complains and gruntles and questions why they can’t hire someone to do it. Tom just laughs and tells him to shut his over-privileged mouth and keep mopping.

The truth is they could easily get someone in to do the cleaning for them, it’s just that Tom doesn’t want to, feels like they really ought to do this by hand, by themselves. To build the business from the ground up. And quite frankly, some real, good hard work is just what he needs. For the first time in ages he’s so physically exhausted by the time he goes to bed that he falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow. He still has nightmares, but he gets in a couple more hours sleep every night and that makes it worth it.

Even though Harrison loudly grumbles about the rough labour he is a hard worker. Tom teases him a lot about it. Telling him he didn’t expect to end up doing this when he was sent to that posh public school as a child. Telling him that this is what good honest works feels like. Informing him that the pain he had in his knees from scrubbing the floors is what heavy labour feels like. It’s all jokes thought, for even they grew up worlds apart on the social scale they still fought on the same battlefield and as children they fought the same imaginary dragons.

In the end aid comes in the form of Lady Lauren Osterfield herself.

Tall and lean and dressed from top to toe in fine silk and fur in soft colours and with hair, the same shade as her son, in soft waves. She sways into the office one day, unannounced, as Tom’s trying to scrub the dirt from the walls and Harrison’s sprawled out on the floor, fighting a particularly stubborn piece of dirt. A hard a look of deepest disapproval is written all over her face as she takes in the scene.

“Darling” she drags out the word and make the endearment sound like a loving, but stern warning. “You simply cannot do this on your own”

“But mommy we-” Harrison begin but she stops him with a raised hand. “I will hear none of it, sweetie. If there is one thing I know it’s potential, and this place has got spades of it. However, I will not see my darling boys like this” she huffs, then adds “also, the rate you two are going at you’ll be in your 50’s before you even had your first client.”

She walks over to where Tom stands, now leaning against the broken desk, hands in pockets and covered in dust and sweat. “Sweetheart, it is wonderful to see you again” And she strokes his cheek with a satin gloved hand and Tom can’t help but to lean into the touch.

He had spent many a school holiday at the Osterfield house. Although, house wasn’t the right word. Technically it was a manor house – Osterfield manor was in fact its name. It had been built by Lord Ashley Osterfield in the early 1600th and had stood proudly on its green fields ever since. Tom had lived in the village, in a small cottage with his mother, father, three brothers and a half-blind cook/nanny named Cully. Harrison, since it was the family tradition, had been sent away to Eton whereas Tom had gone to the village school. But whenever summer holiday rolled around, they’d play on the grounds to the manor and in the forest surrounding it. They had played thief’s and robbers, Robin Hood and Peter Pan. Life had been blissful and full of light. He can still remember how the last month before summer break had seemed endless, how he’d counted down the days until his best friend would return, staring out of the window during class, not listening to whatever Ms Frank was going on about. They sent each other letters of course. About what was going on at home, what tricks each had played on their friends, or on their teachers, how awful school was or about the latest mystery novel they’d read.

His memories of the Osterfield family were many and fond. Lady Osterfield, with her loving but stern ways, never looking anything less than perfection, bringing them meringues and freshly made lemonade to the treehouse where they sat people-watching, spying on the garden parties going on below. Memories of Lord Osterfield, reading his newspaper outside in the warm summer sun, dressed in linen suits and with a great moustache covering his upper lip, teaching Tom tennis and playing croquet with them. And then little Charlotte Osterfield, Harrisons little sister. With her long, blonde hair neatly combed and braided, always carrying around a teddy bear, following them wherever they went. Harrison would get rather annoyed with her for that, but Tom had always said that she could join them if she wanted to.

He remembers Christmas eve at their house. A ginormous three in the hall, neatly decorated by Lady Osterfield herself. Countless of cousins and great-aunts and uncles coming over. The staff running around cleaning every corner. The chef, Mary her name had been, yelling orders and shouting herself blue in the face. The end result had been incredible though, and as snow covered the entire manor and its grounds there was a fire lit in every room, the smell of ham and turkey in the air, glitter and light and mistletoe and presents in overload. He remembers still, being sent home in the horse driven carriage on Christmas eve, belly full of delicious food and sweets, and presents from Lord and Lady Osterfield to every member of his family, including one to Cully, surrounding him as he watched the snow fall over the pretty little village outside the carriage window.

“Hello, Lady Osterfield, it’s been a while” he manages to get out. Because this is, has always been, his second mother. And it hurts even more to see her now, despite the fact that war doesn’t seem to have aged her a day. But seeing her reminds him so much of his own mommy, and his stomach seems to revolt.

“That” she says, and he thinks her eyes are wet with unshed tears “it certainly has been”. She doesn’t ask how his war had been, why he hadn’t return sooner, or sent them letters. Probably understands that he cannot give her those answers. Not yet at least. She lowers her hand and take a step back.

“So” she announces and there’s a level of authority to her voice that makes both Harrison and Tom stand up straighter. “I will send Georgina over, hopefully she can start tomorrow already, because this really is urgent”. She looks around her surrounding, the broken furniture, the floors and ceiling that refuse to give up the dirt they’ve been holding onto for years, despite Tom and Harrisons desperate scrubbing.

“Sorry? Mommy, who.... who on earth is Georgina?”

Tom smiles, for he can almost hear the curse word Harrison so nearly lets out.

“Oh darling, it’s Georgina Brewster, she is simply marvellous and really the only one who can save this place. I shall call on her immediately, she will work wonders, just you see”.

Georgina Brewster, as it turns out, would have put fear of the devil into any and every one of the generals Tom had met during the war. She practically comes in as a steamroller into the office the very next day and before either Tom or Harrison know what’s going on they’ve been thrown out of their office with strict orders to “keep out of the way, for gods sake, and don’t come back until next Friday at least!”

And because neither Tom nor Harrison dare to contradict her, even though Tom’s apartment is above the office and he now has nowhere to sleep, they listen and keep out of her way, spending their time at Harrisons, or rather Harrisons parents, place in Belgravia.

There they plan out and strategize, trying to agree on what exactly their business should be and how they should conduct it.

Their first hurdle is the name of the agency.

“So”

They’re at ‘The Bugle’ again and Tom is swirling the liquid in his glass back and forth, holding a lit cigarette in his other hand. Around them the air is filled with smoke and conversations. Tom had, rather cheekily, asked the barman if they shouldn’t get their drinks for free, seeing as they did save his ass just the other night. The barman had done his usual ritual of mumbles and grumbles before pouring them some watered down Irish whiskey.

“So?” he asks, implying that Harrison should continue his unfinished statement.

“What should we name it, mate?” Harrison is leaning back against the wall, his long legs sprawled out. He looks as exhausted as Tom feels.

“Name what?” Tom dumbly inquires, only half his mind on the conversation, the other on the gorgeous woman at the bar. She looks strangely out of place, wearing a respectably coat, dark hair neatly organised in curls and a soft smile on face as she’s conversation with the infamously grumpy barman, who – and Tom can hardly believe his eyes – is smiling back at her.

Harrison snorts and with a voice practically dripping in sarcasm he answers “Oh the golden retriever puppy we’re adopting! The fuck you think, mate? The detective agency of course!”

Tom gives his friend a kick on his sprawled-out legs.

“Holland Detective Services” he then states.

Harrison goes quiet for a second, rubbing the aching spot on his leg where Tom managed to get in a perfect hit, the bastard had always been good and noting soft spots. “Not Holland & Osterfield?” he asks, only half joking.

“Nah, too posh mate, we’ll sound like some solicitors’ firm, you know, like ‘Bundle & Alfredson & Alfredson & Bundle”, too ridiculous. Plus, no one trusts solicitors with their secrets, they’re too posh and proper. We need people to feel like they can come to us with things they can’t go to the police with.”

He looks over to the bar again, but the beatiful lady is nowhere to be seen.

And so, Harrison Detective Service is founded. The office (the apartment miss Brewster luckily left him handle himself) is revealed to them.

It’s perfect. There’s no other word for it. It’s looks professional but not over styled. The two large desks made from oak, the bar table with its whiskey decanter, the filing cabinets strategely placed in the little backroom, the lamps giving the office an almost golden and mysterious lightning, and on the wall hanging above his own desk, the painting of the woman that his grandfather left him. The only thing remaining from the original office.

It doesn’t take long until their first client arrives. He’s a perhaps not the ideal client, Tom notes. The man is in his late 50’s, wearing an ill fitted suit and smelling distinctly of B.O. He is however willing to pay.

Thus, this is how Tom ends up chasing a, to say the least, unwilling witness all down Euston Road. The man he’s chasing is fast, and Tom’s side is hurting and he feels out of form. He really should have had something other than whiskey for lunch. The man does a quick turn left, right over the road and Tom’s right at his heel.

A car horn blows and there’s a blinding light and for a moment Tom’s back on the battlefield in France, he throws up his arms, trying to shield himself for whatever is coming at him. His entire body tenses up and he waits for the inventible crash. But it doesn’t come, and there’s shouting but he can’t hear what they’re saying, the blood rushing through his head too loud for anything else to sound real. His lungs feel too tight and his breaths are shallow.

Slowly he regains control of himself, as he tries to take the world around him in.

The shouting is coming from a very angry driver, half hanging out of his window telling Tom to get out of the way, waving his arms in fuming gestures. People on the pavement have stopped what they’re doing, some mid conversation or mid walk, all just staring at him. He jumps into action again, desperately trying to push down the part of his brain that’s still in France. He can’t see his witness, but there’s only one place he really can have gone.

He runs up the marble stairs, ignoring the glaring stares around him.

The foyer is impressive to say the least. It’s a large circular room, marble from floor to ceiling. Right in front of him, but all across the room, is a reception and an elderly woman sitting behind it.

“Excuse me sir, we close in twenty minutes,” she calls after him, but it’s all she manages to get out before he’s gone, having made his way all across the hall and into the large oak doors with a sign simply stating ‘Main Library’.

The doors slam behind him and the sound eco in the silence. At first he’s taken aback, for this is nothing like the marble mausoleum he’s left behind, and if he thought the reception area had been large then this room is massive. It’s nothing short of a labyrinth of oak bookshelves, reaching from top to ceiling and filled with large volumes of books that look as if they must be older than queen Victoria.

He can only assume that this is where his witness is hiding, somewhere in this maze he has taken cover, wrongly assuming that Tom will just give up and leave. His witness is in no such luck. Tom does however remember noting the lineament of a revolver inside the other man’s jacket, and by now he’s had more than enough time to take it out, perhaps just waiting for Tom to be close enough not to miss.

The library looks empty and surely it must be this late. On slow but quiet feet he makes his way to the left side of the room, deciding to start there. Careful not to make a sound he removes his own revolver from its holster. Slowly he starts to make his way down the aisles, every time he turns a corner he knows it’s about whoever is the quickest with their trigger that will win.

By the time he’s made it down aisle three he can feel his heart beat so hard in his chest he finds himself wondering if it’s going to leave a bruise on his skin with its violent beating. Adrenaline has been running in his veins since the near contact with the automobile outside.

And then he hears it, a sound, what might be the noise of shuffling, and he starts to move with even higher awareness of the danger of the situation. Any second now he could stare down the barrel of a gun.

Before he can be a coward about it, he jumps around the corner of the shelf, gun in hand and pointing it straight at the witness.

Except it’s not him.

It most certainly is not him.

A pair of enormous and breathtakingly beautiful - but also terrified - eyes stare at him and for a second the whole world seems to stop, or crash, and Tom can’t help but feel like he’s a planet that completely unexpectedly has gotten knocked of its axis. He goes still, not just his body but his mind too. Everything just seems to stop, and Tom can not remember anytime that has ever happened to him before. All he sees is a pair of hauntingly beautiful, and vert familiar, eyes.

“I’m sorry sir, but weapons are not allowed inside the library.” Her voice is soft and even, but Tom can hear the slight tremble behind them, he can tell she’s playing braver than she feels. He knows that trick all too well. So, he lowers his revolver, but doesn’t unload it, still ready for his hostile witness to pop up, and if he does Tom will be ready for him.

“I beg your pardon, miss” he says and looks her up and down, trying to take in the rest of the woman in front of him. He’s pretty sure she is the same woman he saw at the Bugle the other night. She’s only a few centimetres shorter than he is, but then she’s wearing a pair of kitten heels. Her black pencil skirt and white blouse practically scream out respectability and woman. Around her neck hangs a thin, golden necklace with a little golden heart attached to it. A fleeting question of who has given her this pass his brain. And then there’s her hair, brown and styled in and fashionable curls.

“Sir” she says, and she sounds sterner now, a little wrinkle between her eyebrows “could you please pu-“ but before she can finish the sentence, before she can even finish her though Tom’s pushed her down on the ground, trying to cover her with his body as bullets fly around him. He swears under his breath, and he feels the librarians still body under him and he can practically feel her heartbeat. He tries very hard not to react to how close their bodies are to each other. His hyper focused mind hears her hitched breathing even above the sound of a firing gun and he sends a silence prayer to whatever god might be listening that she’ll get out of this unharmed.

The witness is far away from them, all across the hall and if it wasn’t for the fact that he didn’t want to leave this woman unprotected he would just hope for the best and rush against him, firing as many bullets as he had and if he survived this, and if Harrison found out he would just have to take his scolding later. Still trying to cover the women underneath him he raises his gun and fires. He knows the chances of him aiming right are damn near zero from here, but he wants to make it clear to the other man that he sure is not going to give in without a fight.

Still keeping his eyes on the bookshelf the witness has hidden behind he whispers to the librarian, “when I move off you, go hide behind the bookshelf, do not run for the main entrance whatever you do, but if there’s another way out, and you get a chance to leave, I suggest you fucking take it miss”. He hears a hiss of breath and then, a quiet “alright” and that is all he needs.

Springing to his feet he rushes seven meters ahead and then throws himself down behind another bookshelf. Daring to cast a look behind him he just about manages to see the secretary hide behind another bookshelf. Good, he thinks to himself, at least he doesn’t have to worry about her. And so he sprints out from the bookshelf and runs for all his might straight against the bookshelf the witness is hiding behind. It doesn’t fall, but he can hear countless of books falling, hopefully all over the man with the gun. He hears a shout of surprise and despite the situation he can’t help but smiling, the all too familiar rush of adrenalin runs through him and he jumps around the corner. However, before he can even raise his weapon something hard hits his temple and the world goes white for a moment as he stumbles over.

The other man is above him, throwing punches, hitting different places of Tom’s face with every hit. Tom tries kicking and luckily enough the stupid idiot above him has mounted him at chest level and haven’t taken his legs in consideration. One of Tom’s kicks hits the shelf and as he grabs the man's arms with his, stopping the flow of punches he sees a thick book (Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, he notices with glee) fall down and hit the man straight on the head. This time it’s his turn to stumble and Tom shake him off him with ease, but the other man quickly recovers, and lunches over him again, arms stretched out to grasp around his throat. Before he can even try to fight the bigger man off him, the loud sound of the shot of a gun echoes against the walls of the library and he stills. Then he feels it. A bright burning in his side and then, another shot.

He manages to turn around trying to make sense of the situation. On the floor lays the hostile witness, clutching his leg, where he’s clearly just been shot, and above him stands the librarian. Arms shaking as she’s clasping the gun in her hands.

For a moment Tom forgets about everything else. The mess they’ve made. The fact the police must be on their way. The bleeding man beside him. The fact that he’s bleeding too. All he sees is he terrified but impossibly brave woman in front of him.

Slowly, trying to ignore the pain in the side of his stomach, he gets up and walks over to her, arms stretched up in a gesture to show that he means her no harm, for she looks terrified to the point where she’s trembling all over. Her eyes are still fixed on the man on the ground, who’s shouting in agony.

“Look at me” he says, and his voice is firm and calm “Hey, miss, look at me”. She does, and something in his stomach churns. Once in the woods he and Harrison had all but stumbled over an injured deer, it had had the same look upon its face then as the woman had upon hers now. But he doesn’t flinch, don’t want her to lose focus but keep it on him and not the bleeding bastard on the floor.

When he finally reaches her, he takes the gun from her still clasped hands, unloads it, and put it in its folder by his chest.

“You’ll be alright, yeah? I promise you’ll be alright” he tries to reassure her but she keeps looking at him with that utterly terrified look on her face.

“Just hang on for a second, alright?” He doesn’t want take his eyes off of her, but he knows he has to, so he turns away from her and walks over to the injured man. Leaning down over him he whispers in his ear “mate, the police and probably the ambulance are on their way. They will be here any moment. Now, listen up, alright, ‘cause I’m only saying this once. You will be a fucking gentleman about this and when the police ask what happened here you’ll tell them it was some randy bugger trying to nick your stuff, yeah? You defended yourself, ‘cause you’re a lad and all that bullocks. They won’t believe you, but they can’t prove anything else.” His voice is low and threatening and he knows he has the witness full attention. “And in return” he continues “in return, I’ll stop hunting you over this Faulcon business, yeah? I’ll go after someone else, and when I finally have enough to turn that bastard over to the police, your name won’t be mentioned anywhere, yeah?” The man looks up at him with bloodshot eyes and nods.

Moving away from him he swiftly walks over to where the other mans’ revolver got lost in the fight and he takes it, places it in the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he walks over to the librarian, who, apart from her shaking hands has not moved a muscle. She’s staring at him, but not at his face this time, but eyes fixed on the wound at his right side. It’s pretty much only graced him. It still hurts though, and a bloodstain is growing ever larger and larger, staining his white button ups to the point where he doubts he’ll ever get the red out.

“Miss, look at me, yeah?” He tried to get eye-contact with her again, because even if she’s been incredible brave so far, she looks as if she’s about to pass out “Just focus on me, I’ve got to get us out of here thought, do you know any other way then the main entrance? Some back door?”

As he’s talking he buttons up the suit jacket, effectively hiding the wound. He sees her eyes flicker down for a brief second as he does so. Then, as if she suddenly wakes up she takes a breath so deep he can’t help but to wonder if her lungs had been empty. “Yes” she then says, and he feels the immense relief over the fact that her voice sounds clear and controlled again. “It leads straight out into a back alley and then out on Gordon Street.”

He stares at her, taking her in again. Her dark hair still in perfect curls framing her, perhaps somewhat paler, face. Her back is straight, her hands still somewhat shaking. He notices her red fingertips, and no gold ring to be seen. At least he doesn’t have to deal with some unknown husband, who probably wouldn’t be too happy with him if he’d heard what Tom dragged her into.

“What’s your name?” he asks, because he has to know.

“Laura” she breath out.

Just a first name then.

“Well Laura” he says “let’s leave”.

He takes one of her shaking hands in his, and she leads the way out of the chaotic scene, leaving behind them a massive hall and a labyrinth of bookshelves and in that labyrinth an injured man slowly losing consciousness.

***

A/N - Harrisons family is of course entirely fictionalised. As is everyone in this story.

Also, my sort of face claim for Laura in this story is Gene Tierney, but imagine it as whoever you like.

#tom holland #tom holland headcanon #tom holland imagine #tom holland x reader #tom holland fanfiction #tom holland x y/n #tom holland x oc #tom holland au #tom holland x you

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aryanasmith006 · 3 years

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6 Surprising Reasons Why You Keep Getting Denied for a Small Business Loan

If you have okay credit and you are still having trouble getting a business loan, you are probably very confused. You may be wondering why you are being denied for a small business loan.

Lenders do not necessarily have to tell you, and it may not have anything to do with your credit score. On the other hand, it may have everything to do with your credit score—just not the one you think.

Strong fundability vital to business loan approval

Fundability is a business’s current ability to get financing. Sounds easy enough, right? Here’s the thing: there are over 100 factors that affect the fundability of your business. Some of them are obvious and easy to fix; others are not so obvious and can be very difficult to fix.

Fundability is like a giant puzzle, but some of the pieces are larger than others. If your larger pieces are in place, the smaller pieces will not matter so much when it comes to the big picture. However, if you are having trouble with your larger pieces, those smaller pieces can make all the difference when it comes to loan approval.

So, the moral of the story is that all the pieces count, and you need to do all you can to make sure each piece is in place. Why are you being denied for a small business loan? Maybe one of these fundability issues is causing problems.

6 possible reasons you’ve been denied for a small business loan

1. You do not have a fundable foundation

The foundation of your business refers to how your business is set up. If it is not set up to be fundable, lenders will deny you every time. Your business has to be set up to appear to be a fundable entity separate from you, the owner. If you do this from the beginning, it’s faster and easier, but it’s never too late to do it.

The fundable foundation is like a puzzle within a puzzle; it’s a big piece of fundability made up of a lot of smaller pieces. What does a fundable foundation consist of?

The first step in setting up a fundable foundation is to ensure your business has its own phone number and address. The address needs to be a physical address where you can receive mail—a P.O. box or UPS box will not work. You also need a business phone number listed in the 411 directory.

Employer Identification Number

The next thing you need to do is get an Employer Identification Number (EIN) for your business. This is an identifying number for your business that works similar to how your Social Security number works for you personally.

Sole proprietorships and partnerships often just use their SSN. This, however, looks unprofessional to lenders, and it can cause problems when you are trying to establish and build a business credit profile that is separate from your personal credit profile.

Incorporate

Incorporating your business as an LLC, S corporation, or C corporation is important. It doesn’t guarantee approval, nor does not incorporating guarantee denial.

However, it lends to the legitimacy of your business in the eyes of lenders, not to mention that it also offers some protection from liability. Be sure to discuss with your attorney or tax professional which option will work best for your business.

Business bank account

A separate, dedicated business bank account is important. Many lenders require it, and it helps with the general operations in a number of ways. You cannot get a merchant account to accept credit card payments without a business bank account, and it also aids in keeping business expenses separate from personal for tax purposes.

Other elements of a fundable foundation include:

Licenses. Make sure you have all the licenses you need to operate legally.

Website. A professional business website is important. Yes, lenders may look. It should be hosted on a paid platform.

Business email address. It should have the same URL as your business website. Do not use free email like Gmail or Yahoo.

2. You don’t have an established business credit report, or you have a bad one

Did you know your business could have its own business credit report? Most business owners realize this, but what they do not realize is that it is vastly different from personal credit, right down to how you get it.

It does not happen on its own; you have to intentionally work to establish and build a business credit profile. The great part is, having a fundable foundation is the first step.

A business credit report is much like your consumer credit report. It details the credit history of your business. It is a tool that lenders can use to help determine the creditworthiness of your business.

Other areas that can affect your credit score:

“Secret” business data agencies

In addition to the agencies that directly calculate and issue credit reports, there are other business data agencies that can affect those reports indirectly: LexisNexis and the Small Business Finance Exchange are two examples of this. They gather data from a variety of sources, including public records.

As a result, they have access to information you probably do not realize could affect your ability to get a business loan.

For example, data relating to automobile accidents and liens is out there for lenders to see. You cannot access or change the data these agencies have on your business, but you can ensure that any new information they receive is positive. Enough positive information can help counteract any negative information from the past.

Identification numbers

There are other identification numbers that you need in addition to an EIN. Each business credit reporting agency (CRA) has a number that it uses to identify your business.

However, typically you are assigned a number. One notable exception to this is the D-U-N-S number used by Dun & Bradstreet. As it is the largest and most commonly used CRA, you definitely need this number.

Business credit history

In addition to your business credit score, lenders will look at your business credit history. They want to know:

How many accounts are reporting payments?

How long have you had each account?

What type of accounts are they?

How much credit are you using on each account versus how much is available?

Are you making your payments on these accounts consistently on time?

The more accounts you have reporting on-time payments, the stronger your credit score will be.

Business information

Consistency is of utmost importance as well. Be absolutely certain that your business name and address are listed exactly the same everywhere. If you spell out “street” one time and use “ST” another time, it could be a problem; if you use an ampersand in your business name on one document and the word “and” on another, that could also be an issue. Little details can cause big problems with lenders, and can result in you being denied for a small business loan.

3. There is an issue with financial statements

Obviously, both your personal and business tax returns need to be in order if someone is going to lend you money. But there is more to this than just tax returns:

Business financials

If you can, have an accounting professional prepare regular financial statements for your business. This is much better than simply printing reports from your accounting system.

Having an accountant’s name on your financial statements lends to their reliability. Monthly or quarterly are great, but at least have professional statements prepared annually so they are ready whenever you need to apply for a loan.

Personal financials

Typically, lenders will ask for personal tax returns from the past three years. It is best if a tax professional prepares them, but obviously if the years are already passed and that isn’t the case, you use what you have.

This is the bare minimum you will need. Lenders may ask for a number of other documents, such as check stubs and bank statements, among other things.

4. Other bureaus have information on you or your business that looks bad to lenders

An example of another bureau having negative information on you is ChexSystems, a consumer reporting agency which provides information on closed checking and savings accounts.

ChexSystems also keeps up with bad check activity that will make a difference when it comes to your bank score. Too many bad checks can keep you from being able to open a bank account in the banks of camp hill pa, and that will definitely look bad to lenders.

Pretty much everything else is also fair game. Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Do you have a bankruptcy or short sell on your record? Are there any UCC filings or liens? All of this can and will play into the fundability of your business and may result in your being denied for a small business loan.

5. You have bad personal credit

Your personal credit score from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion can all affect the fundability of your business as well. The No. 1 way to get a strong personal credit score or improve a weak one is to make payments consistently on time. Be certain you monitor your personal credit regularly to ensure mistakes are corrected and that there are no fraudulent accounts being reported.

6. You botched the application process

Yep, even the application process can be an issue. First, consider the timing. Is your business fundable right now? If not, this may not be the best time to apply for a loan with a traditional lender. Try another funding option, like an alternative lender, while you work on fundability.

Next, make sure that your business name, business address, and ownership status are all verifiable—lenders will check.

Lastly, choose the right lending product for your business and your needs. Is a traditional loan or a line of credit better for you? Would a working capital loan or expansion loan work best? Choosing the right product to apply makes a difference.

#loan #business loan #banking

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irstaxlawyerlosangeles · 3 years

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What To Ask The IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles Before Hiring Them

The IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles is a crucial part of your team, and before you hire them you should ask them for a list of their qualifications. You should also inquire as to the reasons why they are leaving their current employer or if they have any issues.

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For example, if you get your taxes done at a local firm and find they have no IRS tax expertise, there’s probably not much you can do about it. IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles is here to help. You would have to seek help elsewhere.

However, if you do get help from a tax law expert, ask for an IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles who specializes in handling the complexities of the U.S. tax code. They can review your taxes and help you find the right solution.

Learn More Ways To Improve Your Finance

This kind of assistance is invaluable, as it gives you the peace of mind you need when filing your taxes. Consult with IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles Today. They will analyze your situation and advise you on how to maximize your deductions while minimizing your tax liability.

In the past, there was a clear difference between a tax lawyer who was a "tax specialist" and a tax attorney. But not so much anymore. For more information, contact IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles. There are now tax specialists that specialize in specific areas like construction or mergers and acquisitions. While tax lawyers who are known as "tax attorneys" are now being used to handle all facets of taxation.

The IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles needs to possess some level of specialization in the area of taxation. This is important because many individuals do not know all of the tax provisions and laws so having a tax specialist is a must.

More importantly, you should know the types of problems that you may face as a business owner. Reach out to IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles for more info. A tax lawyer who is experienced in your industry can determine what the challenges are and which laws you can take advantage of.

Ask Your IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles for qualifications

Most of the time the tax lawyers either get a phone call, a face to face meeting or at least a telephone interview with the client. They are then offered a contract that is tailored to their needs and which lasts for an agreed period of time. Don't wait, call IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles right away! During this period the tax lawyer works exclusively for you and will advise on all tax issues that are relevant to your business. The client can also get copies of your last tax returns, since the tax lawyer has a duty to have them available. Tell them what your needs are The tax lawyer should know what their particular skills are, in order to offer a tailored solution to your needs. Some of the areas that can be of concern to a tax lawyer are: Legal advice: Legal advice is the legal equivalent of advice about an automobile.

A tax lawyer's qualifications are an important part of the whole process of tax filing. Do you need help? Contact IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles for help. It helps the IRS understand the taxpayer's tax affairs and they can also help you to identify where you can reduce or re-arrange your tax liability, where there are errors in your tax returns or where you are eligible to claim a refund.

When looking for tax lawyers you can ask the following questions:

Who's the main person representing the IRS on the case?

If the attorney is a partner at a law firm that represents the IRS, it means that they are one of the few people who are required to work with the IRS in certain cases. Don't wait any longer, reach out to IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles. On the other hand, if the attorney is just a member of a law firm, he can represent the IRS in cases in which he is not a partner in the firm.

Before you hire a lawyer, make sure they have the necessary qualifications and they have the right qualifications. Want some help? Contact IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeles Today! Qualifications will help you make a right decision, and they will be much useful when you are dealing with the IRS.

What their Lawyers did in the past

When you are interviewing IRS Tax Lawyer Los Angeless make sure they have experience in handling taxpayers, especially those who are facing audit problems. The IRS may look for a tax attorney if they want to avoid major issues.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 3 years

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The Japanese Unification Church paid for The Washington Times (apparently without declaring, as required in the US, their interest)

▲ Ronald Reagan holding a copy of the (UC owned) News World paper.

A top Japanese Unification Church leader who left, Yoshikazu Soejima, was interviewed by The Washington Post in 1984

Moon’s Japanese Profits Bolster Efforts in U.S.

By John Burgess and Michael Isikoff – Washington Post Staff Writers September 16, 1984

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/unification/profit.htm

The Japanese branch of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church has transferred at least $800 million over the past nine years into the United States to finance the church’s political activities and business operations, including The Washington Times newspaper, according to two former high-ranking church officials.

This money is generated in Japan, primarily through a Tokyo-based business operation that uses church members to sell marble vases, miniature treasure pagodas and other religious icons that are represented as having supernatural powers, the former officials said.

▲ Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han with a pagoda made by a Korean church business, Il Shin Stoneworks. These were sold in Japan for $50,000 or more. (Link to SCAM)

The sale of these items has been the principal source of capital for an international network of Unification Church operations, said the former officials, Yoshikazu Soejima and Hiroaki Inoue.

These operations range from Gloucester, Mass., tuna fleets to the anticommunist political lobbying of CAUSA International in Latin America and the United States.

Their accounts could explain how the Unification Church – with fewer than 5,000 U.S. members by some estimates – has been able to support a major Washington newspaper that has lost an estimated $150 million during its first 2 1/2 years of operations.

The Times, showcase of the church’s business network, is seen by Moon as an important source of political influence here, according to Soejima, the former chief of Unification Church public relations in Japan. Exhorted by pep talks to meet “the respected father’s” needs, Japanese church members have worked in recent years under sales quotas requiring them to transfer to the United States roughly $2.5 million a month earmarked for The Times, Soejima said. “The Washington Times was the top priority of the entire Unification Church worldwide,” said Soejima, who was editor of Sekai Nippo (World Daily News), a church-controlled Tokyo newspaper, before being fired last October following a dispute with church officials over control of the paper.

Soejima and Inoue said the religious icons were distributed by Happy World Inc., an importing firm based in Tokyo that they said is church-controlled. But a senior Unification Church official denied in an interview last week that the church had any relationship with Happy World.

“Our view is that the Unification Church has nothing to do with sales activities,” said Hiroshi Sakazume, the Japanese church’s director general of public relations. “We don’t know what each church member is doing. But as a church, we don’t do any sales . . . . Happy World is a different company, a totally separate organization.”

Sakazume said, however, that the Japanese church is transferring money overseas. In church theology, he said, it is Japan’s duty to play the mystical role of Eve, giving succor to the church’s children in other countries. “I cannot say exactly what the amount of money is, but I can tell you that we are doing it legally,” he said.

Soejima, 37, is the highest-level church official to break with Moon and publicly discuss the church’s operations. In five lengthy interviews with The Washington Post in Tokyo, he provided details about church finances that were supported by hand-written notes he said he had made after monthly meetings of top church financial officials in 1981 and 1982.

His statements also were supported by Inoue, who headed church operations on Shikoku Island before being fired by the church and who sat in on four of the interviews with Soejima.

Soejima and Inoue now publish a small Tokyo newspaper that has printed several articles critical of the Unification Church.

Soejima said he joined the Unification Church as an idealistic university student nearly 20 years ago and that he continues to believe in its public objectives of uniting world Christianity and eradicating communism.

But, he charged, Moon had betrayed his followers and distorted the church’s lofty goals by turning his movement into a huge money-making machine. “By the end of 1975, the main activity of the church was collecting money, buying lots of real estate in Korea and the United States and starting a lot of businesses,” Soejima said. Moon “is not working for the world, but for himself,” he said.

▲ Sun Myung Moon in Danbury prison

Moon, who is serving an 18-month sentence for income tax fraud [and document forgery] in federal prison in Danbury, Conn., declined a written request to be interviewed for this story. The 64-year-old evangelist, who said in July that he was moving the worldwide Unification Church headquarters to his prison cell, works in the facility’s kitchen and has been receiving a stream of visitors from around the world, according to church officials and others who have visited him there.

Founded by Moon in South Korea in 1954, the Unification Church has grown into a multinational conglomerate of business, political and cultural organizations. Causa International, a church-financed political group headed by Moon deputy Bo Hi Pak, has spent millions of dollars in recent years on anticommunist lobbying in Latin America and the United States.

The diversity of church businesses is enormous: the church has invested more than $60 million in Uruguay in recent years, buying the country’s largest luxury hotel, its fourth-largest bank, a publishing company and large tracts of farm land.

▲ Ginseng tea is manufactured by a church company, Il-Hwa. Ginseng has NOT been proven to have any significant health benefits. For Sun Myung Moon it generated $millions, much of that from Japan.

It owns four South Korean manufacturing companies, including a ginseng tea company, a titanium firm and a machine-tool and weapons manufacturer, that had estimated total assets of $198 million last year, according to figures published in the Maeil Economic Daily newspaper in Seoul. It also operates tuna fleets and fish-processing plants in Gloucester, Mass., Norfolk and Alaska and owns newspapers in Montevideo, Cyprus, Tokyo, New York and Washington.

In the Washington area alone, besides The Times, the church owns a downtown construction firm, Monumental Construction and Moulding Co.; an Alexandria television production firm, Tele-Color Studio, and a number of McLean-based companies, including Unification Church International (UCI), which was incorporated in 1977 by Bo Hi Pak, and has been described by federal investigators as the ultimate church holding company in the United States. UCI owns One Up Enterprises, which in turn owns News World Communications, which in turn owns The Washington Times, according to interviews with former church members and corporate records on file in the District and in Fairfax.

Another McLean-based UCI subsidiary, U.S. Foods Corp., collects $497,310 a year from the D.C. government for office space it rents to the Department of Human Services and other city agencies at 605 G St. NW, according to city records.

The source and scope of the church’s investments in this country have long puzzled outsiders, including congressional and federal investigators. Soejima and some former church members in the United States said they believe most American church businesses, such as the tuna fleets and fish-processing plants, are run by inexperienced managers and lose money or, at best, break even. “They lose their shirt constantly,” said Jeremiah S. Gutman, a New York lawyer who represents the Unification Church in this country.

The church’s ability to finance these ventures has been especially puzzling in light of the relatively small number of church members here.

The church claims 2 million to 3 million followers around the world, including 300,000 in Japan and 30,000 to 40,000 in the United States, of which about 8,000 are described as full-time members. Three former U.S. church members interviewed recently and researchers who study the church have said that these numbers are highly exaggerated and that the church has been losing membership rapidly, especially in the United States, where recruitment is believed to have slowed to a trickle several years ago.

Soejima estimated the number of Japanese members at 8,000 and quotes Moon as saying in 1982 that he was disappointed because there were only 2,000 members in the United States – a number that is slightly lower than the estimates of about 3,000 members supplied by former church members and a figure of 5,000 cited by Gutman.

A House subcommittee, which investigated ties between the church and the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, concluded in a 1978 report that the church’s funds came from domestic businesses, church fund-raising and “funds from outside the United States, the ultimate source of which was undetermined.”

Based on their former access to internal church documents and Soejima’s attendance at numerous top-level meetings of church financial officials, Soejima and Inoue said their conservative estimate is that the church has transferred at least $800 million to the United States in the past nine years. Starting in 1975, they said, the church mobilized its Japanese members for a massive fund-raising effort that has used high-pressure sales techniques to take advantage of the religious superstitions of Japanese consumers. Handwritten notes that Soejima made at some church finance meetings indicate that the Japanese church was taking in more than $100 million a year during 1981 and 1982, most of which was transferred to church headquarters in New York.

One set of notes, based on a church financial report from June 10 to Sept. 10, 1981, states that the Japanese church raised about $54 million during the three-month period (based on 1981 exchange rates), of which about $38 million was sent “out” – a term that Soejima said meant abroad. That figure was representative of the year’s other three quarters, he said.

Soejima said that sales revenues tailed off the following year but were substantial. His notes say that from January through August 1982, the church earned monthly profits of between $6.8 million and $14.2 million for a total of $81.4 million. He said similar amounts were earned during the last four months of the year. That would mean the church earned about $122 million in 1982, of which 90 percent was shipped abroad, according to Soejima.

He said these transactions were usually made through international bank transfers, but large amounts of cash were carried into the United States by church members because “sometimes Moon wants money right away. Getting permission to send it by bank transfer takes time,” Soejima said.

When Moon conducted a “mass wedding” of 2,075 couples in Madison Square Garden in 1982, 400 Japanese men and women were flown over for the event. “Each person took, I think, about $2,000,” Soejima said.

According to Soejima, a confidential financial statement would be distributed to 10 to 12 top Japanese church officials each month. These statements would show roughly $2.5 million earmarked for The Washington Times.

Each month figures on actual spending would show the previous month’s target had been met. Senior officials would then deliver pep talks on “the respected father’s” needs for a better showing next time, he said.

“Always, it ended with a statement that this is where we stand now, so go out and fight harder,” Soejima said.

According to his account, the ability of the church to generate these funds is based on its control of Happy World Inc., a company that is headquartered in a utilitarian fifth-floor office in a Tokyo business district and whose president, Motoo Furuta, is chief of the Japanese church’s financial bureau, according to Soejima. Church spokesman Sakazume said Furuta is not a church official. In a recent interview, executive manager Sanji Nakada described Happy World as a diversified company that, among other activities, distributes computer equipment and runs a canning factory on Hokkaido Island and a health-drink factory near Tokyo. Nakada said Happy World is not a church organization but that some employees may be church members.

Happy World’s main activity is importing of consumer goods, such as marble vases, miniature treasure pagodas and ginseng teas from church-owned companies in South Korea, including Il Shin Stoneworks, Tong Il Co. Ltd. and Il Hwa Co. Ltd., according to Nakada and the company’s sales brochures. The vases, pagodas, ginseng and other consumer items are distributed to about 10 wholesale and retail outlets throughout Japan that, according to Soejima and Inoue, are controlled by the church and use church members as door-to-door salesmen.

▲ Marble vases and other items manufactured by Il Shin Stoneworks in Korea were sold in Japan by the Unification Church for very high prices. A statue of Buddha can be seen top right.

More than 2,600 complaints about the sale of marble vases, ivory seals and miniature pagodas of the kind that are often sold by church members were lodged with the Japan Consumer Information Center between 1976 and 1982, according to a report made by the government-funded agency.

[By 2020, as ordered by courts all over Japan, more than $1billion had been paid out in compensation to victims of Unification Church scams. This chart only covers 1987-2016]

Hundreds of these complaints involved reported cases of intimidation, threats or misrepresentations in which salesmen preyed on the “religious anxieties” of consumers, according to the center’s report. The small objects often were portrayed as having mystical powers that could save unhappy marriages, cure illnesses or purge the evil spirits of samurai ancestors, the report said.

The center has published pamphlets to warn consumers about the sales of these items. In one case cited in a center pamphlet, a woman whose husband had just died in an auto accident was being sold one of the objects. The salesman told her the evil spirit of a samurai ancestor who had killed with his sword was tormenting the family. The sale would solve that. “If you don’t buy it, the same evil spirit will continue with your children and they will meet the same fate,” the salesmen said, according to the pamphlet.

Consumer Center officials cannot directly link such incidents with the church’s operations here. The salesmen, Soejima and Inoue said, are instructed never to identify themselves as being with the Unification Church or Happy World. “We had orders that, when engaging in economic activity, never say you are a member of the church,” Inoue said.

Nevertheless, Consumer Center officials say they have sometimes been contacted by low-level distribution companies – which Soejima says are church fronts – and told to refer consumer complaints about the items to them. “We can presume that behind the scenes these sales groups have a systematic link,” according to the Consumer Center report.

According to Soejima and others, the profits from sales of these items can be enormous. In an extreme case, he said, a vase that cost about $21 was sold for $8,300. A quantity of ginseng worth about $42 sold for eight times that amount. One salesmen can raise about $4,000 per month, he said.

The salesmen’s expenses are minimal. During his years in the church, Soejima said, he often visited church members at grimy group houses where they slept half a dozen to a room. The members receive no salary from the church and immediately hand over all their sales proceeds to the house “leader.” Once a month, Soejima said, a church official comes to the house and “they collect it in cash and bring it to Tokyo.”

In a two-hour interview in Tokyo, four former church members told of being assigned to sales soon after joining. Church officials conducted sales-training lectures using films and stressed the need for money to finance “the restoration” under way in the United States.

All four members, who asked not to be identified, said they were told of Happy World’s role soon after joining. “I was told it was the economic department of the Unification Church,” said a 24-year-old woman who had sold ivory [name] seals door-to-door.

▲ Ivory name seals

The primary role of The Washington Times within Moon’s global organization was underscored in ways other than the financial support it received from Japan, Soejima said. He cited a series of meetings in February 1983 that began at church headquarters at the New Yorker Hotel, where about 70 church officials from round the world gathered to celebrate Moon’s birthday.

With Moon and his family standing before them in ceremonial Korean dress, selected church officials played different religious and political leaders, such as Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, President Reagan and Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Each one prostrated himself before Moon, bowing his forehead to the floor three times, Soejima said.

“The meaning is that Moon is higher than all of them,” Soejima said. In church theology, “Sun Myung Moon is the father and his wife is the mother of the whole human race.”

The next day, with the church officials assembled at Moon’s estate in Tarrytown, N.Y., Moon expressed disappointment with his inability to win more converts in the United States.

But he spoke with pride of The Washington Times, bragging of important officials who had attended its opening ceremonies. Moon said that James Whelan, then publisher of The Washington Times, “listens to what I say and makes the newspaper as I tell him,” according to Soejima.

Soejima added that Bo Hi Pak, Moon’s top deputy and chairman of News World, may not have been telling Moon the full story of Whelan’s role at the newspaper. But Soejima also said that at the same meeting, Pak remarked that there was a problem at The Times because church members were being assigned to unimportant jobs in the library and files.

According to Soejima, Moon responded: “It’s not a difficult problem. If each one of the church members does missionary work and converts three reporters, then we can have unity.”

At a later meeting in June 1983 on Korea’s Cheju Island, Moon told a church group that four things were necessary for world consolidation: ideology, economy, science and technology, and journalism.

“With journalism, we have now reached success by establishing The Washington Times,” Moon said, according to Soejima. “We now have a direct influence on Reagan through The Washington Times.”

By Soejima’s account, his break with the church followed a dispute over editorial independence. As editor of Sekai Nippo, Soejima said, he was attempting to transform the paper from a church organ into a respected journal with general appeal. At the end of last September, however, he said, he began to hear rumors that Moon had ordered his firing.

On the first of October, about 100 people – including about 30 in special karate training groups – barged into the paper’s office. They were led by members of Shokyo Rengo, an anticommunist political group affiliated with the church, Soejima said. They broke into desks, stole papers and beat up some of the employees, he said. Soejima, Inoue and a policeman that Soejima had previously summoned took shelter in an office when they arrived. “The church members kicked in the door but stopped when they saw a policeman inside,” he said.

Sekai Nippo vice president Naohiro Nada said the church fired Soejima because he was trying to seize full control of the newspaper and make himself president. Soejima filed papers at the company registry to accomplish this, Nada said. Soejima says he did so to protect his position after learning Moon planned to fire him.

On June 2, 1984, Soejima was attacked outside his home in Tokyo and stabbed repeatedly, according to police reports. When the attack occurred, he was preparing an article [This is the hidden part of the ‘Unification Church’ = これが『統一教会』の秘部だ] critical of Moon that was later published in the Japanese magazine Bungei Shunju, he said. SEE LINK BELOW.

During an interview, Soejima unbuttoned his shirt to show scars on his left bicep, neck and chest, which he says he got in the attack. No one has been arrested in the case.

_________________________________________

Shigehiko Togo of the Washington Post Tokyo Bureau and special correspondent Martin Anderson in Montevideo, Uruguay, contributed to this report.

_________________________________________

「これが『統一教会』の秘部だ」世界日報事件で『追放』された側の告発  “This is the hidden part of the ‘Unification Church’ – Accusation by the side ‘thrown out’ in the Sekai Nippo ‘World Daily News’ incident”

『文藝春秋』 1984年7月号 Bungei Shunjū magazine July 1984 by 副島嘉和 Soejima Yoshikazu (編集局長 editor and publisher) そえじまよしかず (「インフォメーション」編集発行人) and 井上博明 Inoue Hiroaki (営業局長 sales manager) いのうえひろあき (「インフォメーション」営業担当)

These are the sections of the article:

暴カをふるって占拠 The violent occupation [of a place]

なぜ訣別したのか Why did I leave?

「愛のマグロ釣り研修」とは What is the “Love Tuna Fishing Training”?

日本語版から削除された個所 Items removed from the Japanese version [of Divine Principle]

敬礼式の奇怪な儀式 A bizarre bowing ceremony

金集めに狂奔 A craze over collecting money

「ハッピ一ワ一ルド」社とは？ What is the “Happy World” company?

脱税の手ロ The method of tax evasion

セ一ルスマン用の手引書 Handbook for salespeople

米国における脱税裁判 The United States tax evasion trial

This story reveals Japanese recruitment techniques: My sister was sold by the FFWPU to a Korean farmer

A huge FFWPU / UC financial scam in Japan is revealed

Shocking video of UC of Japan demanding money

Judge in Japan: “FFWPU used members for profit, not religious purposes”

The mystery of the emigration of 4,200 Unification Church women to South America where one of them committed suicide. She left three children behind.

Moon’s activities in South America, giving background to this story

The Atsuko Kumon Hong “suicide / murder” of August 2013

Moon personally extracted $500 MILLION from Japanese sisters in the fall of 1993. He demanded that 50,000 sisters attend HIS workshops on Cheju Island and each had to pay a fee of $10,000.

Illegal, church-organized high-pressure sales scheme

6,500 women missing from FFWPU mass weddings

How Moon bought protection in Japan

“Apology marriages” made by Japanese UC members to Korean men

The ‘True Father’ who could not forgive: “I haven’t been able to release my grudge towards Japanese people yet.” November 2011

“Reputations: Sun Myung Moon, The Emperor of the Universe” documentary transcript

#Washington Times #Sun Myung Moon #UC of Japan #extortion

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fthbarlingtontx · 4 years

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Down payment and closing cost assistance

There are thousands of down payment assistance programs (DAPs) across the United States and that includes at least one in each state. Many states have several.

Each DAP is independent and sets its own rules and offerings. So, unfortunately, we can’t say, “You’re in line to get this …” because “this” varies so much from program to program.

Some help with closing costs as well and down payments. Some give you a low-interest loan that you pay down in parallel with your main mortgage. Others give “forgivable” loans that you don’t pay back — providing you stay in the home for a set period. And some give outright grants: effectively gifts.

Mortgage credit certificates (MCCs)

The name pretty much says it all. In some states, the housing finance agency or its equivalent issues mortgage credit certificates (MCCs) to homebuyers — especially first-time ones — that let them pay less in federal taxes.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation explains on its website (PDF):

“MCCs are issued directly to qualifying homebuyers who are then entitled to take a nonrefundable federal tax credit equal to a specified percentage of the interest paid on their mortgage loan each year. These tax credits can be taken at the time the borrowers file their tax returns. Alternatively, borrowers can amend their W-4 tax withholding forms from their employer to reduce the amount of federal income tax withheld from their paychecks in order to receive the benefit on a monthly basis.”

In other words, MCCs allow you to pay less federal tax. And that means you can afford a better, more expensive home than the one you could get without them.

Speak with a mortgage specialist today.

Dream Makers program

Unlike most DAPs, the Dream Makers Home Buying Assistance program from the PenFed Foundation is open only to those who’ve provided active duty, reserve, national guard, or veteran service.

You must also be a first-time buyer, although that’s defined as those who haven’t owned their own home within the previous three years. And you may qualify if you’ve lost your home to a disaster or a divorce.

But this help isn’t intended for the rich. Your income must be equal to or less than 80% of the median for the area in which you’re buying. However, that’s adjustable according to the size of your household. So if you have a spouse or dependents, you can earn more.

It’s all a bit complicated. So it’s just as well that PenFed has a lookup tool (on the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD’s) website) that lets you discover the income limits and median family income where you want to buy.

What help does the Dream Makers program offer?

You’ll need a mortgage pre-approval or pre-qualification letter from an established lender to proceed. But then you stand to receive funds from the foundation as follows:

“The amount of the grant is determined by a 2-to-1 match of the borrower’s contribution to their mortgage in earnest deposit and cash brought at closing with a maximum grant of $5,000. The borrower must contribute a minimum of $500. No cash back can be received by the borrower at closing.”

So supposing you have $2,000 saved. The foundation could add $4,000 (2-to-1 match), giving you $6,000. In many places, that might easily be enough to see you become a homeowner.

You don’t have to use that money for a VA loan. You could opt for an FHA or conventional mortgage. But, given the advantages that come with VA loans, why would you?

The Dream Makers program is probably the most famous of those offering assistance to vets and service members. But there are plenty of others, many of which are locally based.

For example, residents of New York should check out that state’s Homes for Veterans program. That can provide up to $15,000 for those who qualify, whether or not they’re first-time buyers.

Start your home buying journey here.

State-By-State Home Buyer Assistance Programs

We promised to tell you how to find those thousands of DAPs — and the MCC programs that are available in many states.

It takes a little work to find all the ones that might be able to help you. But you should be able to track them down from the comfort of your own home, online and over the phone.

A good place to start is the HUD local homebuying programs lookup tool. Select the state where you want to buy then select a link and look for “assistance programs.”

Your best starting point is probably the state’s housing finance office though it might be called something slightly different. You should find details of programs or just a list of counties with phone numbers. Call the number where you want to buy, explain your situation and ask for advice. It’s their agents’ jobs to point you to local, state, or national programs that can help you.

If you look in the right place, you could secure some very worthwhile financial help to assist you in buying your first home.

Check today's VA rates by completing this quick online form. https://ift.tt/3mr1lhX

#Arlington first time home buyer #first time home buyer assistance Arlington #Arlington first time ho

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foreverlogical · 4 years

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To battle the economic crash from the coronavirus pandemic, Congress is sending Americans cash. The deal just hammered out will send $1,200 to every adult making under a certain income threshold, and $500 for every child. But will the money actually get to everyone?

In many cases, it turns out, it could take weeks or months. And many of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans will face further difficulties once the check arrives.

"The Treasury Department is expected to begin directly depositing checks within a few weeks of the bill's passing," The New York Times reported. "But mailed payments will take one or two weeks longer, Republican Senate aides said Wednesday." It sounds like the mailed checks, for individuals who don't have bank information already on file with the IRS, could take up to two months, and earlier reports suggested they could take up to four. And that time frame doesn't even get to the question of people who may be too poor to have filed taxes, who may move a lot, or who may not have reliable housing, and whose address has to be pieced together from Social Security data or the Veterans Administration.

Meanwhile, one out of every four U.S. households either has no bank account or has real trouble accessing one, which adds further hurdles to actually being able to use the money. "You'll have to cash that check, and take that cash and put it into a money order again to pay your bills," Mehsra Baradaran, a professor at the University of California at Irvine who studies banking inclusion and inequality, told The Week. That process will impose further fees, not to mention the costs, time, and effort required to physically go from the check casher to the utility and landlord's offices to pay bills and rent.

Senate Democrats, including Sen. Sherrod Brown's office, tried to do something about this. Baradaran helped Brown draft a provision that would give any American who needed it a free banking account — available at any local bank or post office — in which the $1,200 aid could be directly dropped. Others in the House, like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), have their own proposals to do something similar. Ultimately, none of this made it into the Senate deal, which has now passed the House and is headed to President Trump for signing. But Brown and Tlaib have also introduced their proposals as standalone bills. And we really need to fix this, for both moral and economic reasons.

Around 8.4 million U.S. households (or 6.5 percent) are "unbanked," meaning they have no bank account at all. Another 24.2 million households (18.7 percent) are "underbanked," meaning they technically have a bank account but have real difficulty using it. As Baradaran explained, low-income Americans' finances don't mesh well with banks' business models, which are designed more for the steady income flows of the middle class. Less fortunate Americans are constantly hit with fees for things like overdrafts or not having enough money in their accounts. Nor are they particularly profitable for banks, so many institutions have simply abandoned those communities, leaving people with either no banking option, or a branch that's 50 miles away. Regulations used to require banks to keep a branch in every community, but those rules were dismantled in the 1990s, and "those voids were filled with payday lenders and check cashers" as Baradaran put it. Those outfits charge even more onerous fees and interest rates for their services.

Imagine the U.S. payments system as three concentric networks, with each network serving different groups — and each of very different quality. The innermost circle links the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve with the major private banks, and those banks to each other. This network can settle transactions extremely fast, say three to five days. (There are efforts afoot to get this down to 24 hours or less.)

The next network out is essentially the public-facing side of the private banking system — it's what connects individuals and households and businesses to the banks. This is the network that can get everyone their direct deposits in a few weeks.

This situation is already rather remarkable, since we have a public system — the first innermost network — that no one but big private banks are allowed to participate in. Meanwhile, private for-profit banks get the privilege of being the middle-man between that public system and the actual public. "There's no reason banks should be that middle man unless they're mandated to give everyone an account, and they're not," Baradaran noted.

Things are even worse out at the fringes of the circles of inclusion. That's the third network that serves the unbanked and the underbanked and people less directly tied into the second network. This is where people have to wait two months for a check in the mail, cash it with a bank if they're lucky, and otherwise go through the whole obstacle course of check cashers and payday lenders and money orders.

At a minimum, we should plug the people in the third fringe network directly into the first, which is what Brown's bill would do. Under that proposal, when your check got mailed to you, you could pick it up at the post office and open a simple banking account — free, no fees, no minimums — that would plug you directly into the Fed and Treasury Department's payment system. You could cash your check right there and use the money via a debit card that would come with the account, without dealing with any profit-seeking third parties.

Providing a public option for basic banking services via the U.S. Postal Service is an idea that's actually been floating around for a while — in fact America did do that, from 1911 to 1966. (There are also proposals to just give every American an account with the Federal Reserve directly.) Baradaran said her "dream version would be every post office would have this option" — i.e. use this scheme to take every American in both the second and third networks, and plug them directly into the first, innermost network. But Brown's more limited bill would've at least plugged the third network's unbanked and underbanked into that first inner network.

Admittedly, this wouldn't completely solve the initial problem of how fast the checks go out. But it would help, and it would end the obstacles and exploitation that marginalized Americans face when using the money. And if Congress needs to authorize more of these payments — which will almost certainly be needed — the bank accounts will now be in place.

Tlaib's bill is even more ambitious: It would give every American a pre-paid debit card that would plug directly into that inner network, and that Congress and the Treasury Department could automatically refill with money whenever they wanted. In fact, Tlaib's proposal called for four payments of $2,000 each to every person of all ages. "It's trying to provide a novel infrastructure through the pre-paid cards, to get past the limitations of direct deposit or mailing checks," Rohan Grey, president of the Modern Money Network, who helped Tlaib's office draft the proposal, told The Week. (News reports tended to ignore this aspect of Tlaib's bill, focusing instead on its unusual financing mechanism: have the Treasury Department mint trillion-dollar coins and deposit them with the Fed to avoid having to issue new debt.)

The U.S. government already uses similar debit card systems for programs like food stamps, so the basic infrastructure is in place. Between mailing the cards and making them available for distribution at banks and post offices and schools and the like, Tlaib's proposal might actually have been able to get the first payment out even faster. And again, further payments would be automatic, and the debit card system could be integrated with a postal banking public option or Fed-accounts-for-all down the line.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, none of these ideas made it into the final package. It's not clear why, but we can speculate: lobbyists for industries like payday lenders have clout on Capitol Hill, and these proposals would be an existential threat to their industry. For the moment, the ease and reliability of that inner network remains a privilege reserved for the powers of the banking and financial industries, while we mere citizens have to deal with the private banking system on its terms — and the least fortunate among us are left out in the cold entirely.

Many of the millions who have already lost jobs probably need money now. Even people who still have jobs, but who don't earn much, face a coming cascade of hardships, from the need for food, rent, utility bills, and more. (The government also didn't do itself any favors by making the money means-tested, which will add further time for government agencies to calculate what everyone is owed.) Millions of human beings will suffer because of the delay. Meanwhile, the longer it takes for that money to hit people's pocketbooks, the more time there is for the negative feedback loop of job loss leading to less spending leading to business closures leading to more job loss to build on itself, deepening the hole the economy will eventually have to dig out of.

But Congress can always pass more bills, and by all accounts the coronavirus crisis will last long enough that political pressure for more cash aid to average Americans will likely become overwhelming. The sooner we can stand up a fast and simple public banking option for all, the faster we can get aid out to everyone — both in this crisis and the next.

Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.

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johnheintz · 4 years

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Winners and Losers in the Coronavirus Stimulus

I have a group chat I share with three friends. We are old friends with wildly different life paths. I’m a teacher, lawyer, writer in Chicago, and Jim in an entrepreneur in Chicago. Steve is a hospital administrator in New York. Pete is a scientist in Vermont.

Early in January, Pete heard the news of this new virus from a Wuhan, China, wet market. Pete researches disease and drugs for a living, and since he’s talking with friends, he occasionally lets himself be wrong for dramatic effect.

Coronavirus was big. His posts were dramatic, and when the rest of us teased him, he pushed back, explaining how “we’re screwed.” Over the next month, Pete would be proven entirely correct. By mid-March no one on earth hadn’t heard of Covid-19 and its cause, the novel coronavirus. Even Congress was listening.

Two disasters loomed. The millions likely to die would only be outweighed by the total failure of the global economy that could impoverish the world in a way never seen in modern times. No reasonable person disagreed with either disaster.

For the first time in a decade, Democrats and Republicans in Congress started talking. The health crisis required instantaneous action mostly already within the statutory authority of the Executive branch. The economic crisis needed legislative action. People needed to stop moving around and spreading the virus, and it had to happen immediately. This meant no one who couldn’t work from home could work at all. No work meant no money. No money meant no food and no home. People with no money in the bank, which meant most Americans, needed money immediately or they would go to work and spread the virus because they would have no other choice.

I need to defend Congress here. The President dithered, but the Majority and Minority leaders in the House and Senate moved quickly to act.

Quick action reveals instincts. When you’re in a crisis, you respond using the reasoning capacities you’ve built up prior to the crisis. When in the crisis itself, you react. Congress reacted, and the subsequent bill tells us a lot about the default positions of the Democratic and Republican parties.

What is the Act?

It’s called the CARES Act, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. You’ve already heard it’s $2 trillion. The government is spending money, so that’s why it’s being called a “stimulus.” There are good reasons not to call it a stimulus, since governments take stimulus actions to encourage economic growth. This bill is doing the opposite. It’s encouraging people to stop economic activity, or at least to stop economic activity that is not essential. The goal of the bill? ”Freezing the economy in amber“ or ”putting the economy into an induced coma” are two metaphors explaining the goal of the stimulus, but for those of us who live in a partisan world, a world where government is either spending or not spending money, this is massive government spending that can comfortably be called a stimulus.

Who are the winners?

There are three big winners in the bill. Individuals get 30% of the stimulus. Big corporations get 25%. And small business, state and local governments and public services share the remaining 45%. Democrats insisted on the direct payments and the unemployment increases, and Republicans insisted on saving big businesses, especially the airlines.

The remaining 45% breaks down with 19% for small businesses, 17% for state and local governments and 9% for public services, mostly hospitals.

It’s already clear the next bill will help states and local governments. Lobbying is happening at a furious, socially distant pace, but state and local governments cannot run deficits like the federal government. That is, states and localities cannot simply print money, like the The feds will have to provide them support or the downstream effects will create an economic tsunami as great as the coming federal one.

It may seem like Congress acted quickly, but plenty of horse trading went into the preparation of this bill. Only the cruelest free marketeers can stand up and say government should stay out of this crisis. Those people exist, and they seem to want a certain number of dead bodies before they act. Luckily, enough Americans understand the gravity of the crisis and drown out partisan drum beating in the name of saving our loved ones’ lives.

Who are the losers?

The worst losers are people on fixed incomes and future debt payers, like today’s college and younger kids. No matter what the feds call it, the US is taking on debt. Since Donald Trump arrived in office, the debt went up $3 trillion bringing the pre-coronavirus stimulus to $23.5 trillion or $70,000 for every person living in the US. Now that debt will be $25.5 trillion. Future generations have to pay.

A quick side note, this stimulus is a necessary and good kind of debt. As Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff has said, "The whole point of not relying on debt excessively in normal times is precisely to be able to use debt massively and without hesitation in situations like this." Borrowing costs money, but saving lives at this scale is worth it.

The primary losers, then, are future generations. But that’s a generic reality for government debt. The primary losers that could have been named in this bill but weren’t are more interesting.

Small businesses are definitely losers. Unlike the checks written to individuals, small businesses has strings attached to most of the money in the stimulus. Small businesses are asking right now whether they are able to keep everyone on their payroll, which is the stated purpose of the stimulus loans. The primary question is whether, if they are already heavily leveraged, they will be able to take on this additional debt. The stimulus provides that any small business that keeps paying its workers will receive forgivable loans, but small businesses aren’t sure how or if that will really work. Small businesses face this uncertainty despite the desire of Congress to pass a decisive bill that would remove uncertainty in the economy. Why?

At least a sectional of the Democratic Party does not like business. They are still reeling from the Great Recession when, according to the left, bailouts should have gone to individual homeowners and not big banks. Democrats make little distinction between big business and small business. Terms like “profiteers” and “capitalists” don’t allow for subtle distinctions like separating Boeing from your corner mom and pop coffeeshop. Blue Chip Republicans don’t care about small companies much either. They want to ensure companies already running and already providing big products and big services to big quantities of people keep running. That’s why the second biggest winner of the stimulus are large corporations.

Small business is a blend of Democrat and Republican, so when the crisis arrived and wish lists were created, small business took a back seat to the Democrats’ individual payments and the Republicans’ corporate payments.

Losers in the stimulus are the environment, education, youth, poor, infrastructure and essential workers.

Carbon offsets and clean energy incentives like solar, wind and nuclear never made it into the bill. The impact of climate change like mass migrations, regional armed conflicts, ecosystems failed and lives lost will make this pandemic’s worst death toll estimates of 2-5% of those infected truly seem like the seasonal flu.

Education got money in the stimulus, but it’s not what you think. States run education, not the feds, and federal involvement in education is, compared to the big money spent by states and local governments, miniscule. Schools that are keeping staff won’t be doing it for long. Tax revenues will be small as the effects of shelter-in-place kick in. Schools will be the hardest hit since in most states schools are the largest recipient of state and local revenue that will disappear. Schools will likely hold onto all their workers, even if they know they’ll have to borrow to pay them. States and local governments assume federal help is coming, and Speaker Pelosi has already said the next legislation will help state and local governments, which is code for schools and other less expensive essential services like police and fire. But it’s notable that education didn’t make it into the first stimulus bill. It signals, however slightly, that neither the Dems nor the Republicans care to prop up the existing school system exactly the way it exists today.

Youth are a big loser in the stimulus. College kids dependent on their parents will not get a check, which should draw the attention of college kids who are going to join the workforce in what’s shaping out to be another Great Recession. Bigger is the future bill youth will have to pay for the excesses of this generation.

Are you under 30? If so, consider that you will live in a world your parents and grandparents created that benefitted them enormously but that you will never enjoy. China will be the world’s biggest economy soon, and just as the US set the rules when it was the biggest economy, you can be sure China will set the rules when it’s number one. You will be working in a smaller economy and paying bills your parents ran up today based on poor planning.

Another loser in the stimulus is the poor. Cataloging the ways the stimulus fails the poor require too much space, so let’s focus on the big, obvious ways. First, poverty means people are less likely to file taxes, which means they won’t get a check. Second, poverty means jobs are more precarious, low wage workers were the first to be let go, and they will be the first to run through the additional unemployment benefits in the stimulus, if they can get through to their state’s unemployment agency before they are evicted, have the internet turned off at home or don’t have time to file because they are homeschooling their children since the schools are closed. If the poor have jobs, they will likely need to go and have fewer protections to avoid catching the virus. Mobile phone location data is already coming out showing poor neighborhoods are staying-at-home far less than wealthier areas. But most of all, the stimulus targets the economy as a whole. The American economy as a whole never did much for the poor. They still don’t have quality health care or any health care. They still have worse schools. They still have worse food. This stimulus improves nothing for the poor.

Buzz in Washington is that another $2 trillion bill for infrastructure is being negotiated. If the feds want to inject a big stimulus in the economy, it should have passed that infrastructure bill in the first bill. We have all heard the list of infrastructure needs, but each is essential. First, the US needs national broadband. Second, the US needs a web of connected transportation options, from transit and air to railways, roads, and waterways, as a means to reduce congestion, protect the environment, and stimulate economic development. Third, the US needs a massive workforce development program to transform workers for the digital economy. Fourth, the US needs to up its funding of Pre-K-12 and higher education to ensure every child is ready for the new economy. Fifth, the US needs a far better public safety program including offering federal leadership for technical assistance that helps all levels of government develop evidence-based community policing programs that build trust, improve community relations and reduce racial tensions and crime rates.

Essential workers were losers in this stimulus bill, too. The stimulus provides big money for Covid-19 responses that should include making sure essential workers are well protected and well paid. Other countries like the UK and Germany have provided additional benefits to essential workers, identifying them by name and marshaling national resources to ensure they have protective gear and abundant equipment. The stimulus echoes the current US response. It’s vague and indirect. Chicago where I live keeps sending emergency notifications to all cell phones even while almost every health care worker I know on the front line is telling me they want to quit. Spain is the worst example of endangered essential workers. Garbage bags, old shirts and duct tape do not provide the kind of protection they need, and the US isn’t doing much better.

Why should we care?

Crises come suddenly, and they reveal core priorities and levels of preparedness. How prepared the US was for this crisis will be readily apparent in the next 6-12 months. What core priorities the US holds is already apparent. We should care about the apparent core priorities of our elected leaders because, if they don’t match our priorities, they need to be held accountable at election time.

That Republicans support big business and the Democrats support individual workers is no surprise. This is the first crisis felt by all Americans with such far reaching effects. Being optimistic, let’s say a vaccine is developed quickly and life returns quickly to close to its pre-pandemic rhythm. No one will ever forget that when a crisis hit, government was called on to solve it. No matter whether you have a righty Republican’s healthy mistrust of government or a lefty Democrat’s exuberant trust of government, responding to catastrophes is what governments need to be prepared to do. To the extent we are not prepared, it’s time to make a mental note for the future.

We need to care about the winners and losers of the first stimulus for two major reasons. First, the first time a big bill is passed, it sets the cap on what will be passed in future legislation. The stimulus was the bigest gun Congress could fire in defense of the US. Future legislation could go bigger, but if the infection rate doesn’t decline, and if a vaccine isn’t discovered quickly, the gun wasn’t big enough. Once the infection rate declines a bit, we can expect more politics, more friction, slower decision-making and less powerful effects from the next rounds of legislation.

Second, when in crisis and you have to negotiate, you resort to your biggest wants. We need to work to ensure the environment, education, youth, poor, infrastructure and essential workers are front of mind, as we continue responding to this crisis and for the next one.

The macroeconomic effects of this global shock will almost certainly be felt for decades. China’s claim of a V-shaped recovery seems overblown for China, so the odds of that happening in the US are slim. A big drop is rarely followed by an equally big increase. Make a gun with your left hand. A gun-shaped recovery seems more optimistically realistic. The thumb is the drop, and the pointer finger is the recovery. In other words, return to normalcy will likely come slowly as winners build their strength and losers lose even more.

Pete my friend’s worst fear seems right now to be untrue. It’s still early days understanding this virus, but if it mutates, come back annually in winter or never leaves and keeps mutating, the harm to lives and economies will return annually as well. The Spanish Flu came back a second time and killed more people in the second wave than the first. Right now, rumblings from scientists are that this virus isn’t mutating. If it’s not, that means that once there is a vaccine, it will stop the virus completely and allow us to rebuild our economies before they impoverish too many people.

The question we should be asking ourselves in the moments we can see beyond the immediate crisis is this. Are we happy with the winners and losers Congress chose to create with the largest economic stimulus bill in the history of the world?

John Heintz is based in Chicago.

#Covid-19 #Coronavirus #Stimulus #$2 trillion #Congress

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/trump-organization-tax-fraud?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=vanity-fair&utm_social-type=earned

Which Trump Kid Will Take the Fall for Years of Tax Fraud? Your thoughts 💭

https://t.co/KUPKWGuv0J via @VanityFair

THE FALL FOR YEARS OF TAX FRAUD?

Junior and Eric, it’s time to prove your loyalty.

BY BESS LEVIN |Published October 16,

2019 | Vanity Fair | Posted October 16, 2019 7:40 PM ET |

Last February, not long before he reported to prison, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen testified that his boss had regularly inflated his personal assets when it served his purposes to do so, like to obtain loans, and deflated them when reporting lower numbers was to his benefit—like, for instance, in order to reduce his tax liability. Shortly thereafter, the House Oversight and Reform Committee subpoenaed Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, for eight years of his financial records, a move the president did not respond well to, suing committee chairman Elijah Cummings and fighting tooth and nail to keep such information under lock and key. Last week a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the subpoena, which Trump is likely to appeal again, possibly to the Supreme Court. And based on a new report by ProPublica, which highlights apparent tax fraud by the Trump Organization, you can understand why!

Documents obtained by reporter Heather Vogell show major discrepancies in how the president’s companies reported expenses, profits, and occupancy rates for two buildings, making the properties appear more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax authorities, just as Cohen testified. At 40 Wall Street, for example, the Trump Organization told Ladder Capital that the building was leased at 58.9% on December 31, 2012, and then shot up to 95% a few years later, knowing that lenders wanted to see rising occupancy levels, or “leasing momentum,” which was critical to obtaining a new $160 million loan with a lower interest rate. (Based on the figures the Trump Organization gave to them, Ladder’s underwriters predicted 40 Wall Street’s profits would more than double after 2015.) Yet, per ProPublica, as of 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the building had never met profit expectations, lagging by more than 8%, which experts say is extremely unusual given the amount of due diligence underwriters are meant to do.

According to Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University, the rise in occupancy that the Trump Organization claimed was unusual, and what do you know? Documents submitted to tax officials showed no such surge. Instead the company told tax officials that the building was already 81% leased in 2012, the same figure it reported as of January 5, 2013. “There was a story crafted here,” Riordan said. “It’s contradicted by what we see in the tax filings.”

Also at 40 Wall Street, insurance costs for 2017—when Don Jr. and Eric had taken over the day-to-day business—were listed at $457,414 in loan records and $744,521 in tax documents, while Trump claimed to tax authorities in 2015 that he paid the actual owners of the building $1.65 million for the right to lease it out, despite telling the loan servicer the figure was $1.24 million. “It really feels like there’s two sets of books—it feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Riordan. “It’s hard to argue numbers. That’s black and white.”

These discrepancies are “versions of fraud,” according to Berkeley professor of finance and real estate Nancy Wallace. “This kind of stuff is not okay.” And by not okay, she means potentially criminal. Per Vogell, New York City’s property tax forms clearly state that whoever signs them “affirms the truth of the statements made” and that “false filings are subject to all applicable civil and criminal penalties.”

Meanwhile, documents for the Trump International Hotel & Tower contain similar inconsistencies that, coincidentally, all worked out in Trump’s favor. The Trump Organization told tax officials it made roughly $822,000 renting space to commercial tenants at the building in 2017, but claimed to loan officials that the amount was $1.67 million. Examining eight years of data for the property, ProPublica found that the Trump Organization “reported gross income to tax authorities that was typically only about 81% of what it reported to the lender.” The business also seemed to leave out income it received for leasing the roof for TV antennas on its tax documents, leaving the line for that type of income blank on nine years of filings. And if you guessed such figures did appear on loan documents, as “major sources of income,” congratulations, you’ve cracked Trump’s (alleged!) scam.

While experts who spoke to ProPublica said there can sometimes be legal reasons for numbers to differ on tax and loan documents, they also said some of the discrepancies appeared to have no reasonable justification. “My gut reaction is it seems like there’s something amiss there,” said David Wilkes, a New York City tax lawyer who is chair of the National Association of Property Tax Attorneys.

The Trump Organization refused to respond on the record to the questions provided by ProPublica. A lawyer whose firm handles Trump’s property tax appeal filings for New York City said he was not authorized to discuss the documents. Ladder Capital declined to comment. A spokesperson for Mazars USA said it does not comment on its clients.

********

IVANKA’S $360 MILLION VANCOUVER DEAL IS REPORTEDLY BEING INVESTIGATED BY THE F.B.I.

The First Daughter has her own set of problems.

BY ABIGAIL TRACY | Published MARCH 2, 2018 | Vanity Fair | Posted October 16, 2019 7:40 PM ET |

Even Ivanka Trump, the “princess royal” of the West Wing, is being sucked into the vortex of scandal that has encompassed her father’s administration. In the past week, her husband, Jared Kushner, lost his security clearance, lost his P.R. guard dog, was revealed as a top intelligence target for foreign spies, and was reported to have met with banking executives in the White House shortly before his family’s company received nearly half a billion dollars in loans. Donald Trump is said to be is “frustrated with Mr. Kushner, whom he now views as a liability” and “another problem to deal with,” and has suggested that both he and Ivanka move back to New York.

Ivanka, too, has her own set of problems. While the First Couple braced for an Intercept story that Kushner’s father had failed to secure a loan from the Qatari government just weeks before Kushner backed a blockade of Qatar, CNN dropped another bombshell: United States counterintelligence officials are probing a Trump Organization real-estate deal in Canada in which Ivanka played a leading role.

The financing and negotiations surrounding the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver have come under F.B.I. scrutiny, according to current and former U.S. officials who spoke with CNN. It’s unclear why the F.B.I. is interested in the deal, which dates back to 2013, and in which Ivanka played a key role. But CNN reports that foreign buyers involved, as well as the timing of the $360 million project’s opening in February 2017, may have caught the agency’s attention. Like many Trump Organization deals, the New York-based company does not own the building but rather is paid licensing and marketing fees by the developer, the Holborn Group. Joo Kim Tiah, a member of one of Malaysia’s wealthiest families, runs the Canada-based development firm, and said in October 2015 that the First Daughter was closely involved: “Ivanka and myself approved everything, everything in this project,” he said during an interview.

Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka’s ethics counsel, dismissed the idea that there was anything untoward about the deal. “CNN is wrong that any hurdle, obstacle, concern, red flag, or problem has been raised with respect to Ms. Trump or her clearance application,” he said in a statement. He also denied that the investigation would impact Ivanka’s security clearance in any way: “Nothing in the new White House policy has changed Ms. Trump's ability to do the same work she has been doing since she joined the Administration.” Alan Garten, executive vice president and chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, similarly played down the report, saying that “the company’s role was and is limited to licensing its brand and managing the hotel. Accordingly, the company would have had no involvement in the financing of the project or the sale of units.”

Though it’s unclear whether special counsel Robert Mueller is interested in Ivanka’s involvement in the Vancouver deal, her husband’s contacts with foreign entities has certainly garnered his attention. Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that at least four foreign governments have discussed how they can use the Kushner Cos.’s financial woes and entanglements as leverage over the president’s son-in-law, The New York Times reported that Kushner Cos. received roughly $500 million in financing from two U.S. firms after Jared met with executives from the companies at the White House. (Christine Taylor, a spokeswoman for Kushner Cos., said in a statement that the Times story represented an “attempt to make insinuating connections that do not exist to disparage the financial institutions and companies involved.”)

The cascade of negative headlines has complicated matters for the duo in the White House. Amid an internal struggle with Kelly, who was responsible for altering the White House security-clearance policy—a move some saw as a targeted attack on Kushner—some aides have reportedly “expressed frustration that Mr. Kushner and his wife . . . have remained at the White House, despite Mr. Trump at times saying they never should have come to the White House and should leave.” The president, meanwhile, is reportedly mulling options to sideline them. Per the Times, while he has outwardly encouraged Jared and Ivanka to remain in their West Wing posts, he has also “privately asked Mr. Kelly for his help in moving them out.”

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REPORT: WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS “ALARMED” BY TRUMP’S UKRAINE DEALINGS EVEN BEFORE ZELENSKY CALL

At least four national security officials registered their concerns with a White House lawyer both before and immediately after the July 25 phone call.

BY ALISON DURKEE | Published October 11, 2019 | Vanity Fair | Posted October 16, 2019 7:40 PM ET |

For however “perfect” as he believed it to be, President Donald Trump's now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly raised concerns among administration officials as soon as Trump hung up the phone. As the Washington Post reported Thursday, however, that wasn't the first time aides had raised objections about how the president was dealing with Ukraine. According to the Post, at least four national security officials were so “alarmed” by Trump's apparent attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals that they “raised concerns” with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg both before and immediately after Trump's July 25 phone call. The officials “were not a swamp, not a deep state,” a former senior official told the Post—but were simply White House officials “who got concerned about this because this is not the way they want to see the government run.”

Concerns over Trump's Ukrainian dealings both before and after the call were widespread even among Trump's top advisers, the Post reports, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton and then-acting deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman. The alarm bells reportedly started going off after the abrupt ouster of former Ambassador to Ukraine Masha Yovanovitch, and the Post notes NSC officials “were alternately baffled and alarmed” by the behavior of Rudy Giuliani, who pressed for Yovanovitch's removal and very publicly declared his plan to press Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden. (In addition to the Biden conspiracy, Trump also “became increasingly focused” on baseless right-wing conspiracy theories regarding Ukraine's supposed role in the 2016 election.) Worry among NSC officials escalated even further after U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland—who got his job after donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration—declared that Trump had put him in charge of relations with Kiev. During a meeting with Bolton, then-U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, and Zelensky aides about corruption in Ukraine's energy sector, Sondland “blurted out that there were also ‘investigations that were dropped that need to be started up again,’” the Post reports. “Bolton went ballistic” after the meeting, one official told the Post, and senior NSC officials “huddled” about their Ukraine concerns in the ensuing days. The senior officials also looped in acting U.S. Ambassador Bill Taylor, whose ensuing explosive text messages with Sondland and Volker have since been publicly released.

For as concerned as officials already were about Trump's Ukraine behavior, their concerns “soared” once Trump spoke to Zelensky. In line with previous reports, including the whistle-blower report, the Post notes that Bolton and other senior officials were being contacted “within minutes” of the call's end by their subordinates expressing concern, and a rough transcript of the conversation was moved to a highly secure computer network meant for classified material “within hours.” “When people were listening to this in real time there were significant concerns about what was going on—alarm bells were kind of ringing,” one source told the Post. “People were trying to figure out what to do, how to get a grasp on the situation.” White House officials were reportedly seeking ways to officially report the conversation, the Post notes, which was made challenging by “the lack of a White House equivalent to the inspector general positions found at other agencies.” So they went to Eisenberg, who reportedly vowed to “follow-up.” It's not clear that Eisenberg actually took any action, though—and his lack of any clear response, the Post speculates, could have contributed to White House officials' decisions to share their concerns with the whistle-blower, a CIA employee who was first contacted by a White House official hours after Trump and Zelensky's phone call. (It is unclear whether any of the officials who spoke with Eisenberg are the same ones who spoke with the whistle-blower.)

The reports of how acute the alarm was over Trump's behavior within the White House ranks isn't great for the president as he continues to downplay the allegations and insist he was in the right—and come as damning reports concerning his and Giuliani's Ukraine scheming only continue to escalate. In addition to the fallout over Trump's phone call, new reports this week have raised concerns about how the administration handled the freezing and reinstatement of aid to Ukraine—which could suggest the existence of a “quid pro quo”—with the Washington Post reporting Thursday that political appointees intervened to freeze the aid over the objections of career staffers, who feared the move would be “improper.” The Associated Press, meanwhile, reported Thursday that Yovanovitch was fired after pushing back against Giuliani's rogue Ukraine operation, marking yet another bad story for the lawyer after his clients were arrested earlier Thursday.

While tensions are already running high in Trumpworld, the president and his allies also may soon face even more detrimental details coming to light, should Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top aide on Russia and Europe, testify as planned in the coming days. NBC News reports that Hill is expected to testify that Giuliani and Sondland circumvented the National Security Council to pursue their “shadow policy” on Ukraine, and her impending testimony has reportedly “stoked fear” in the White House given that she's not a Trump loyalist. If Hill, now a private citizen, is able to testify without the White House attempting to exert executive privilege over her testimony, it could also give Democrats the green light to seek testimony from other former White House officials, including Bolton—who's already been very clear that he's totally willing to trash talk his former employer.

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TRUMP CRONY MICK MULVANEY EARNS HIS TURN IN THE BARREL

The perpetually “acting” White House chief of staff finds himself embroiled in the white-hot center of the Ukraine scandal.

BY ERIC LUTZ | Published October 16, 2019 | Vanity Fair | Posted October 16, 2019 7:40 PM ET |

onald Trump’s increasingly brazen attempts to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky into opening an investigation into Joe Biden have put a number of his cronies under the microscope. Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, may have the most to lose, as prosecutors in New York scrutinize his work in Ukraine. Energy Secretary Rick Perry also appears in an unflattering light, as do diplomats Kurt Volker and Gordon Sondland, all of whom were apparently involved in the Trump-Giuliani scheme. More recently, the spotlight has turned to “Acting” Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who is described in a new report as a lynchpin of Trump’s campaign to squeeze Zelensky.

According to the Washington Post, it was Mulvaney who coordinated Perry, Volker, and Sondland’s efforts to abscond with the Ukraine portfolio, moving the administration’s dealings with Kiev out of traditional foreign policy channels and onto more corrupt footing. Giuliani told the Post that he could not recall “any substantive conversation with Mick,” nor could he remember Mulvaney “approving, disapproving, getting involved, [or] having an interest” in the Ukraine imbroglio. But current and former United States officials have placed the acting chief of staff at the center of the scandal in Capitol Hill testimonies in recent days.

Fiona Hill, who had been Trump’s top Russia adviser, dropped Mulvaney’s name in her bombshell testimony on Monday. Speaking to House lawmakers, who are conducting an impeachment inquiry into the president, Hill reportedly testified that then-national security adviser John Bolton had raised alarms about the pressure campaign on Ukraine, describing Giuliani as a “hand grenade” and instructing her to tell White House lawyers that he was “not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up.” Hill also told congressional investigators that Sondland had described an “agreement” with Mulvaney to broker a White House meeting for Zelensky, who took office in May, if he authorized probes into the Bidens and the origins of the Russia inquiry.

George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine, went even further in his testimony Tuesday, telling lawmakers that Mulvaney had told him to “lay low” and focus on other countries in his portfolio—giving control of the administration’s Ukraine policy to the so-called “three amigos” in what the top State department official took as a troubling sign that the White House was pursuing its own political agenda. Mulvaney told Kent to defer to Perry, Volker, and Sondland on matters related to Ukraine, Kent said in his testimony, and felt he was being sidelined “because what he was saying was not welcome” in the administration.

Perry, Sondland, and Volker have all come under intense scrutiny in the Ukraine scandal; explosive text messages released earlier this month show Volker, then-ambassador to Kiev, and Sondland, envoy to the European Union, suggesting that a White House visit for Zelensky and security aid for Ukraine was contingent on the probes Trump and Giuliani were seeking. Bill Taylor, Charge d'Affaires at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, raised concerns about the apparent quid pro quo in exchanges with the other officials: “I think it’s crazy to withhold security for help with a political campaign,” he wrote to Sondland at one point. Volker abruptly resigned his post earlier this month, and Perry’s involvement in the scandal has threatened his job security as Energy secretary.

Could Mulvaney’s position as acting chief of staff become similarly tenuous? Already, the former congressman is facing questions about his misadventures with the “amigos”—Sondland, Volker, and Perry. He is also expected to be called before Congress to testify about the hold he placed on some $400 million in military aid for Ukraine, on Trump’s orders, days before the president’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky.

The White House has already begun an internal review of the matter, reportedly encouraged by Mulvaney, that some insiders fear could be an effort to find a fall guy. But it’s also possible that Mulvaney, in his effort to please the president, could become a scapegoat himself.

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securecheck360 · 5 years

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2020 Labor and Law Update for California State Employers

It is time to take a significant look at some of the most important new laws that have been passed and also which will affect California employers in 2020 and beyond. As usual, employers should review their policies and practices to ensure ongoing legal compliance and to limit potential exposure. Be sure to counsel with lawful guidance as to any inquiries.

Contractor or Employee? How AB 5 will Impact California Employers

The statute fundamentally changes the test used to determine whether workers in California are employees or independent contractors. This monumental change to California employment law will require businesses operating in California to understand the intricacies of AB 5, and its numerous exemptions, and be aware of how their worker’s fit into the new classification scheme. Failure to reclassify workers where appropriate will expose California employers to significant risk, including the collection of unpaid wages and back taxes, civil penalties, and civil litigation.

The bill will be codified as section 2750.3 in the Labor Code and will be effective from 1st January 2020. The bill portrays that all workers are employees unless the hiring business can rebut this presumption. The new statute does not permit an employer to reclassify an individual who was an employee on 1st January 2020, to an independent contractor due to the bill’s enactment.

While the content of AB 5 is extensive and complex, generally it can be broken down into three different parts:

1. It adopts and codifies the “ABC” test established in Dynamex, to determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor;

2. It expands the reach of the “ABC” test to include the California Labor Code and Unemployment Insurance Code, as opposed to only the Industrial Welfare Commission’s Wage Orders; and

3. It specifically exempts certain occupations, industries, and contractual relationships from the “ABC” test, and instead permits the use of the less-stringent, Pre-Dynamex test established in G. Borello & Sons, Inc. v. Department of Industrial Relations (1989) 48 Cal.3d 341, in certain specific circumstances.

Where a worker is not exempt, the “ABC” test applies. The “ABC” test presumes that all workers are employees and places the burden on the hiring business to establish the following factors to classify a worker as an independent contractor: (A) the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work; (B) the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business, and (C) the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity. If the hiring business fails to establish any of these factors, the worker will be classified as an employee.

AB 5 lists several specific occupations to which the older Borello test will continue to apply, including insurance agents, surplus line brokers, analysts, physicians, surgeons, dentists, podiatrists, psychologists, veterinarians, lawyers, architects, engineers, private investigators, accountants, certain direct sales salespersons, securities broker-dealers, investment advisors, commercial fishermen, and certain newspaper carriers. AB 5 also provides that contracts for certain “professional services” are also exempt, under specific conditions. AB 5 defines “professional services” as the services provided by a human resources administrator, travel agent, graphic designer, grant writer, fine artist, payment processing agent, photographer, photojournalist, freelance writer, freelance editor, freelance newspaper cartoonist, esthetician, electrologist, manicurist, barber, or cosmetologist. In addition to falling into one of these categories of “professional services”, hiring businesses must also establish that the worker meets additional, very precise requirements, for an exemption to apply. AB 5 also contains several other miscellaneous exemptions, including for real estate licenses, repossession agencies, the construction industry, and relationships between referral agencies and service providers.

Since the statute has not yet gone into effect, the full scope of AB 5 and its various exemptions, which are complex and specific, remain to be fully explored and potentially litigated. AB 5 is still very much a fluid statute, and California hiring entities should obtain appropriate guidance to ensure compliance with the newly enacted law.

California Recognizes Discrimination Based on Race-Based Hairstyles

California became one of the first state to ban race-based hair discrimination by enacting SB 188, also known as the Creating a Respectful and Open workplace for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act. The CROWN Act expands the definition of “race” under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) to include traits historically associated with race, such as hair texture and protective hairstyles. “Protective hairstyles” include, but are not limited to, “braids, locks, and twists”. The new law goes into effect on the 1st of January 2020.

The CROWN Act acknowledges the disparate impact workplace dress code and grooming policies potentially could have on black individuals. Policies that prohibit natural hair, including afros, braids, twists, and locks, are more likely to deter black applicants and burden or punish black employees than any other group. The stated purpose of the CROWN Act is thus to enforce the “constitutional values of fairness, equity, and opportunity for all”.

California employers should review their dress codes, grooming policies, and general hiring and employment practices to ensure compliance with the new law. Employers operating nationally should monitor legislative developments – New York has enacted a similar law forbidding race-based hair discrimination, and New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Kentucky are also considering such legislation.

Additional Accommodations for Lactation Expression in the Workplace

SB 142 significantly changes existing law regarding an employer’s obligation to provide accommodations to an employee to express breast milk.

Existing law:

Ø Prohibits an employer, who is required by law to give an employee a rest period during a workday, from requiring the employee to work during the rest period;

Ø Requires an employer to pay the employee one additional hour of pay, at the employee’s regular rate of compensation, for each rest period not provided.

Ø Requires to employers to provide a reasonable amount of break time to employees desiring to express milk for the employee’s infant child;

Ø Requires an employer to make reasonable efforts to provide the employee with the use of a room, or other location, other than a bathroom, close to the employee’s work area, for the employee to express milk in private;

Ø Exempts an employer from the break time requirement if the employer’s operations would be seriously disrupted by providing that time to employees desiring to express milk; and

Ø Subjects employers who violate these provisions to a civil penalty of $100 per violation and authorizes the Labor Commissioner to issue citations for those violations.

SB 142 amends Labor Code section 1030 by requiring a ‘reasonable amount of break time’ to express breast milk “each time the employee needs to express milk”. The bill would also amend Labor Code section 1031 by adding additional requirements for a lactation room. As a result, a lactation room or location.

Ø Must be private

Ø May include the place where the employee normally works if that space otherwise meets the requirements of the Labor Code;

Ø Shall not be a bathroom

Ø Shall be close to the employee’s work area;

Ø Must be shielded from view and free from intrusions while the employee is expressing milk;

Ø Must be safe, clean, and free of hazardous materials;

Ø Must contain a surface area to place a breast pump and personal items;

Ø Must have a place to sit; and

Ø Must have access to electricity, extension cords, or charging stations necessary to operate an electric or battery-powered breast pump.

The new law also requires that the employer provide access to a sink with running water and a refrigerator for storing milk close to the employee’s workplace.

Finally, Labor Code section 1034 has been amended to require an employer to develop and implement a policy regarding lactation accommodation that includes the following:

Ø A statement about an employee’s right to request lactation accommodation;

Ø The process by which the employee makes the request;

Ø An employer’s obligation to respond to the request; and

Ø A statement about an employee’s right to file a complaint with the Labor Commissioner for any violation of a right under this chapter.

The employer shall include the policy in an employee handbook or set of policies that the employer makes available to employees. The employer shall distribute the policy to new employees upon hiring and when an employee makes an inquiry about or requests parental leave. If an employer cannot provide break time or a location that complies with the policy, the employer shall provide a written response to the employee.

The amendment thus provides employees with an undefined number of “additional breaks” for expressing milk. The expansion of these Labor Code sections creates significant potential liability for employers who fail to provide “reasonable breaks” “each time” the employee needs to express milk.

New Posting Requirements on Parental Leave

The New Parental Leave Act (NPLA) took effect in January 2018 and expanded the availability of body-bonding benefits to smaller employers (those with at least 20 employees). As amended by the NPLA, the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) provides 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for the birth, adoption, or foster care placement of an employee’s child if the employer has 20 or more employees who avail themselves of this statutory benefits.

New posting requirements regarding the NPLA took effect as of April 1, 2019. Employers with 20-49 employees now have to post information on the available baby-bonding benefits, and employers with 50 or more employees have to update their previous postings. The new required postings primarily address the addition of the NPLA in the CFRA’s definition section and the removal of gender-specific pronouns and references in the CFRA’s Certification of Health Care Provider form.

The posters must be displayed prominently where employees and applicants for employment can easily see them. If 10 percent or more of the workplace speaks a language other than English, a version must also be posted in that language. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing provides translated posters in several languages and will work with an employer if another translation is needed. Some employers choose to purchase and display an “all in one” poster from a Chamber of Commerce, or other private organizations. Employers may also need to update handbooks and train human resources personnel on the new leave policies and updated medical certification form. Employers with 20 or more employees should ensure their postings, handbooks, and training are up to date with the new requirements for baby-bonding leave to ensure compliance with the NPLA.

No Re-Hire Provisions Removed from Settlement Agreements

As a result of AB 749, California employers need to review their standard settlement agreements to remove any “no-rehire” provisions. Under the new law, which goes into effect on 1st January 2020, settlement agreements cannot contain any provisions that prohibit, prevents, or otherwise restricts an employee from obtaining future employment with that employer or its parent companies, subsidiaries, divisions, affiliates, or contractors. Any such provisions found in settlement agreements entered into on or after 1st January 2020 are void as a matter of law against California public policy.

The prohibition only applies to agreements with an “aggrieved person”, which is defined as a person who has “filed a claim against the person’s employer in court, before an administrative agency, in an alternative dispute resolution forum, or through the employer’s internal complaint process”. As a result, employers and employees remain free to enter into severance agreements with terminated employees that contain no-rehire provisions. However, any severance or agreement resolving an employment dispute would be implicated by AB 749. The new law also clarifies that it does not require employers to rehire employees where (1) the employer has made a “good faith determination” that the employee engaged in sexual harassment or sexual assault, or (2) the employer has a legitimate non-discriminatory or non-retaliatory reason for refusing to rehire the person. The new statute, however, does not define what continues a “good faith determination”.

Update on Sexual Harassment Training

Existing law that went into effect on 1st January 2019, expanded requirements for sexual harassment training such that it applies to employers with five or more employees (previously the sexual harassment training requirements applied to employers with 50 or more employees). The existing law includes requirements that employers provide:

Ø At least two hours of classroom or other effective training and education regarding sexual harassment prevention to supervisory employees every two years;

Ø At least one hour of sexual harassment prevention training and education to nonsupervisory employees every two years;

Ø new employees with sexual harassment training with six months of hire; and

Ø Temporary or seasonal employees with sexual harassment prevention training within 30 calendar days after the hire date or within 100 hours worked if the employee is expected to work for less than a period of six months.

SB 778 extended the initial deadline for providing new training to those non-supervisory employees who were not previously covered under prior state law from 1st January 2020 to 1st January 2021. It also clarifies that employees who compared sexual harassment training in 2010 do not need to be retrained for another two years (i.e., until 2021), and then every two years thereafter (i.e., 2023, 2025).

Statute of Limitation for FEHA Claims Extended to Three Years

Under existing law, the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) requires that an employee alleging discrimination, harassment, or retaliation must file a verified complaint with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) before he or she may file a civil action in court. Currently, an employee must file this DFEH complaint within one year from the date of when the wrong occurred. Once an employee receives a Right to Sue Notice from the DFEH, he or she has one year to file a lawsuit.

Governor Gavin Newsom approved AB 9, known as the stop Harassment and Reporting Extension (SHARE) Act, which extends the deadline to file an allegation of unlawful workplace discrimination, harassment, or retaliation under the FEHA with the DFEH from one year to three years. Employers should note that AB 9 does not revive claims that have already lapsed under the current one-year statute of limitation rules.

Exclusion of Mandatory Arbitration Agreements at Outlet of Employment

AB 51 prohibits employers from requiring employees to enter into arbitration agreements covering claims under the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) and the Labor Code as a condition of employment. The bill will be codified as a new section 432.6 in the California Labor Code, and it prohibits any person from requiring an applicant or employee to “waive any right, forum, or procedure” for a violation of the FEHA or the Labor Code, which includes the right to file a civil complaint in court or a complaint with government agency. It makes a violation of Labor Code section 432.6 an “unlawful employment practice” under the FEHA, and also prohibits employers from retaliating against an applicant or employee who refuses to agree to an arbitration agreement. However, AB 51 does not apply to “post-dispute settlement agreements or negotiated severance agreements”. Further, it applies to agreements “entered into, modified, or extended on or after 1st January 2020.

Employer groups have already challenged AB 51 in federal court on the basis that is preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). The drafter of AB 51, anticipating a legal challenge, has attempted to address this by including subsection (f) which states, “Nothing in this section is intended to invalidate a written arbitration agreement that is otherwise enforceable under the [FAA]”.

The California Consumer Privacy Act Requirements for Employers

In 2018, the California legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a law designed to provide consumers with more control over the personal data that businesses collect on those consumers and to have that data deleted, among others. Under the prior iterations, the term “consumer” was broadly defined to include employees and job applicants. Because of this overbroad definition, the California Legislature enacted AB 25, which provides employers with one-year exemption to come into compliance with the law.

Specifically, covered employers have until 1st January 2021, to meet all of the CCPA’s requirements except for two. First, by 1st January 2020, covered employers must ensure they have implemented reasonable security measures, both physical and electronic, to safeguard the personal information of employees and job applicants. In the event of a data breach resulting from failure to implement reasonable security measures, an affected employee can file an individual lawsuit or a class action and potentially recover $ 100 - $ 750 per consumer per data breach incident or their actual damages, whichever is greater. Accordingly, any employer covered by the CCPA should review their electronic and physical security measures to ensure they are appropriately protecting their employee’s data.

Second, starting date 1st January 2020, covered employers must disclose to employees and job applicants the categories of “personal information” collected about them and purposes for which the information will be used. The disclosure must be made before or at the time the employer receives the personal information of any employee or job applicant. The disclosure does not need to list every piece of information collected about the employee, but rather only categories of information. Under the CCPA, covered employers will be prohibited from using any employee personal information that is not listed in the disclosure provided to employees. Therefore, the disclosure should be as comprehensive as possible in terms of identifying all business purposes for which the information is used. Examples of business purposes in the employment context include:

1. To comply with state and federal law requiring employers to maintain certain records;

2. To effectively process payroll;

3. To administer and maintain group health insurance benefits, 401K, and retirement plans; and

4. To manage employee performance of their job duties.

For current employees, the disclosure can be made to them as a group in the employee handbook or through a memo to all employees. Since the CCPA requires the disclosure be made at or before the transaction in which the personal information is collected, the best approach is to include the disclosure with the job applicant for job applicants or future employees.

Employers should be cautious, the term “personal information” is defined so broadly by the CCPA that it potentially covers all information employers collect, maintain, or share about job applicants, employees, and their family members or dependents that could identify the individual or be used in conjunction with other information to identify the individual. Specifically, personal information includes “information that identifies, relates to describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer”. The definition then identifies 11 categories and data elements, including “professional or employment-related information”, education information”, and characteristics of a protected category”.

So what is Covered Business?

The CCPA only applies to for-profit businesses that:

Ø Do business in California

Ø Collect the personal information of consumers including employees, and

Ø Satisfy any of the following criteria:

· Have annual gross revenues over $25 million;

· Annually receive, sell, or share personal information about more than 50000 or more California residents or households or 50000 devices;

· Derive 50% or more of their annual revenue from selling personal information of consumers.

AB 25 delays requirements (apply to employers) that permit consumers to request the deletion of their personal information, the categories of personal information collected, and the categories of third parties with whom the business shares their personal information.

#california #employer #employers #law #2020

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shelawmsluderym09insurance-blog · 5 years

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FICO Scores Decoded…

FICO’s History

FICOis a business analytic software company. They are based in San Jose, California. FICO was founded by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac in 1956. Their FICO score has become the main credit score used to determine consumer credit risk.

FICO was founded in 1956 as Fair, Isaac and Company. William Fair was one of the original founders and was an engineer by trade.

Earl Isaac was another founder and was a mathematician by trade. The two met while working at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park California. In 1958, FICO pitched their first credit risk analysis system to 50 American lenders.

FICO went public in 1986 and is traded on the New Your Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FICO. The company debuted its first general-purpose FICO score in 1989.

Scores are based on credit reports and range from 300 to 850. Lenders use the scores to gauge a potential borrower’s creditworthiness.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac first began using FICO scores to help determine which American consumers qualified for mortgages bought and sold by the companies in 1995.

Originally called Fair, Isaac and Company, this name was changed to Fair Isaac Corporation in 2003.The company rebranded again in 2009, and is now called FICO, making their name the same as the signature FICO score they offer.

Originally it was based in San Rafael California. They moved to Minneapolis Minnesota in 2004. They then moved back to San Jose California in 2013.

The FICO Score… What You Should Know

The most widely used credit score is the FICO Score. The FICO score is a mathematical model that is used to depict a consumer’s risk of going 90 days late on an account within the next 24 months. Lenders use the FICO Score to help them make billions of credit decisions every year.

FICO calculates the FICO Score based solely on information in consumer credit reports maintained at the credit reporting agencies. FICO credit scores range from 300 to 850.

That FICO Score is calculated by a mathematical equation that evaluates many types of information from your credit report, at that credit reporting agency.

By comparing this information to the patterns in hundreds of thousands of past credit reports, the FICO Score estimates your level of future credit risk.

You have three FICO credit scores, one for each of the three credit bureaus: Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. Each FICO Score is based on information the credit bureau keeps on file about you.

The FICO Score from each credit reporting agency considers only the data in your credit reports at that agency.

Your credit score may be different at each of the main credit reporting agencies. If your current scores from the credit reporting agencies are different, it’s probably because the information those agencies have on you differs.

If your information is identical at all three credit reporting agencies, each FICO Score should be very close.

For your FICO Score to be calculated, your credit report with the bureau from which you want your score must contain enough information, and enough recent information, on which to base your credit score.

Generally, that means you must have at least one account that has been open for six months or longer, and at least one account that has been reported to the credit reporting agency within the last six months.

Finally!!! The Answer to Why You Have So Many Credit Scores

There are MANY different credit scores out there. There are credit scores consumers can pull themselves through credit monitoring, mortgage scores, auto scores, and many more.

There are actually over 16 different credit “scorecards” that exist today with FICO alone. Each of these scorecards will reflect different credit scores. These scorecards are designed to help particular industries better gauge credit risk.

The mortgage industry for example is more concerned with a consumer’s past mortgage history than anything else. So they weight home loan history heavier into the total score calculation than other accounts.

So a consumer’s credit monitoring score might be 660, but then when they apply for a mortgage their score might be much lower due to some past negative mortgage accounts on the report. Their mortgage score might even be higher than their consumer score if they have past positive mortgage accounts.

A credit score that a consumer pulls themselves will not be the same as their Mortgage Industry Option Score, the scores lenders and brokers use to access mortgage default risk.

Their mortgage score won’t be the same as their auto score that car dealers pull either which is knows as the Auto Industry Option Score, because the auto score weighs past auto history heavier into the score makeup versus consumer scores.

These different credit scorecards are designed to help specific industries better determine risk. Due to there being so many industries that offer credit, there are also just as many credit scores available.

Plus, different scores are offered by different companies creating even more credit scores. FICO is the biggest provider of consumer credit scores.

But now even the credit bureaus themselves are in the credit scoring game providing their Vantage score.

The Credit Bureau’s Secret Credit Score

Vantage Score is the credit bureaus’ own credit score, designed to compete with FICO.

Vantage Score was unveiled by the three bureaus on 14 March 2006. All three main credit reporting agencies use the same formula to calculate the Vantage Score.

Vantage Score has scores as high as 990 while FICO scores can only be as high as 850. So even though a 700 FICO score reflects good consumer credit, a 700 Vantage score reflects below average personal credit.

Here are Vantage Score 2.0 risk levels: “A” credit scores range from 900–990, “B” credit scores range from 800–899, “C” credit scores range from 700–799, “D” credit scores range from 600–699, and “F” credit scores range from 501–599.

Obviously, scores going up to 990 versus FICO scores going up to 850 have created an issue with lenders. This is one of the main reasons that Vantage Score hasn’t become widely accepted. So the bureaus have now changed their score range with Vantage Score 3.0 which was released in 2013. With the new Vantage Score scores only go as high as 850, mimicking the FICO top score.

How Credit Scores Are Calculated – The Inside Scoop

Fair Isaac and Vantage Score hold their credit scoring formulas as a close secret much like the formula for Coca-Cola or your grandma’s legendary double chocolate-chip cookies.

This can be very frustrating for consumers when they see remarks on the credit report like “too many revolving debt accounts” and not knowing exactly what that means.

Fortunately, Fair Isaac and Vantage Score have issued some public information about how they calculate credit scores.

Payment History: The top rated factor for both models is payment history. This is because lenders want to know a person’s payment history – past and present.

This category can be broken down into three subcategories:

Recency – This is the last time a payment was late. The more time that passes the better.

Frequency – One late payment looks a heck of a lot better than a dozen, and

Severity –A payment 30 days late is not as serious as a payment 60 or 120-days late. Collections, tax liens, foreclosures, repossessions, charge-offs, and bankruptcies are credit score killers.

You can improve this aspect of your score by paying your bills on time. Also, the more accounts you have paid as agreed to offset the ones you don’t will also help your score.

So if you do have late payments reporting on your credit, you can offset these by adding new positive accounts and making sure you have a lot of accounts you are paying as agreed to offset the accounts not paid as agreed.

Fair Isaac and Vantage Score hold their credit scoring formulas as a close secret much like the formula for Coca-Cola or your grandma’s legendary double chocolate-chip cookies.

This can be very frustrating for consumers when they see remarks on the credit report like “too many revolving debt accounts” and not knowing exactly what that means.

Fortunately, Fair Isaac and Vantage Score have issued some public information about how they calculate credit scores.

How much is owed: The score looks at the total amount owed on all accounts as well as how much you owe on different types of accounts (mortgage, auto, etc). Using a higher percentage of the credit limits will worry lenders and hurt the credit score. People who max out their limits have a much greater risk of default.

Utilization: When it comes to revolving debt-credit cards, the formula looks at the difference between the high limit and balances. For example, let’s say your customer has a MasterCard with a credit limit of $10,000 and they have spent $2,000 of it.

This is a 20% utilization ratio. The lower the ratio, the higher the credit score. So, if you are looking for a quick credit score boost, pay down any accounts you can.

With FICO, 30% of your credit score is based on utilization, while 35% is based on payment history. Utilization is the 2nd highest weighted aspect of your scores. This means if you are over utilizing your revolving accounts you can damage your scores as much as if you were paying your payments late each month.

Anything over 30% of your limit being used will lower your credit scores. Adding credit cards to your report with high limits can also SIGNIFICANTLY and quickly raise your scores, sometimes as much as 100 points or more.

One more important tidbit, CLOSED ACCOUNTS do not help and can hurt if there is a balance remaining. A long perpetuated myth has been to close accounts that are not in use but this will hurt consumers in several ways.

As you now know, overall and individual account utilization plays a major role in credit scoring. If consumers close old accounts, your overall utilization rate will increase which will cause their score to decrease.

Fair Isaac and Vantage Score hold their credit scoring formulas as a close secret much like the formula for Coca-Cola or your grandma’s legendary double chocolate-chip cookies.

This can be very frustrating for consumers when they see remarks on the credit report like “too many revolving debt accounts” and not knowing exactly what that means.

Fortunately, Fair Isaac and Vantage Score have issued some public information about how they calculate credit scores.

Length of credit history / Depth of credit: This is less important than the previous factors, but it still matters. It considers (1) the age of the oldest account and (2) the average age of all your accounts.

It is possible to have a good score with a short history, but typically the longer the better. Young people, students, and others can still have high credit scores as long as the other factors are positive. With FICO, this is the 3rd largest aspect of the score calculation.

If a person is new to credit then there is little they can do to improve a credit score. No newly added accounts can be back-dated to improve this score aspect.

You can get added as an authorized user to a family member’s account that has been in long-standing, and that can improve this aspect of your score.

Average age of accounts is another important reason to keep all accounts open. If a consumer has multiple accounts that they’ve had for some time but don’t use, they are still benefiting from the average age of the accounts open in their credit file. Also make sure you use each of your accounts at least once every six months.

Credit issuers must reserve the money offered in credit limits for their clients’ use, so they don’t like having accounts sitting dormant that are not making them money, if an account sits dormant for a long enough time, many creditors nowadays will cancel the account due to inactivity.

Additionally, credit reporting agency will calculate an account as inactive if there has not been any activity in the most recent six month period of time, an inactive account does not benefit your score as much as an active account.

New Credit / Recent Credit: New credit is not always a bad thing. However, opening new accounts can hurt a credit score, particularly if a consumer applies for lots of credit in a short time and doesn’t have a long credit history. The score factors in the following: How many accounts the consumer applied for recently, how many new accounts the consumer has opened, how much time has passed since the consumer applied for credit, and how much time has passed since the consumer opened an account.

The model looks for “rate shopping.” Shopping for a mortgage or an auto loan may cause multiple lenders to request your credit report many times each, even though a person is only looking for one loan. Auto dealers are notorious for running 3 to 15 credit reports. This is called shot gunning the credit.

Luckily, to compensate for this, the score counts multiple auto and mortgage specific inquiries in any 30-day period as just one inquiry. The specific calculation for cut-off dates and types is confusing; we will go over that in detail in upcoming chapters.

For most people, a credit inquiry really won’t have an impact on your credit score. Groupings of inquiries WILL adversely affect your scores. However, inquiries can have a greater impact if you have few accounts or a short credit history.

Large numbers of inquiries also mean greater risk. According to MyFico.com, people with six inquiries or more on their credit reports are eight times more likely to declare bankruptcy than people with no inquiries on their reports.

This can be very frustrating for consumers when they see remarks on the credit report like “too many revolving debt accounts” and not knowing exactly what that means.

Fortunately, Fair Isaac and Vantage Score have issued some public information about how they calculate credit scores.

Types of credit you use / depth of credit: Both models want to see a healthy mix of credit, but they are vague on what this means. They recommend you have a balance of both revolving debts like credit cards and installment loans like auto loans or a mortgage.

The preferred number of credit cards reporting is three.You shouldn’t have more than two mortgages reporting. More than two auto loans are too much. Installment loans also score better if you have two or less.

Here again is how your FICO score breaks down: 35% of your score is based on payment history, 30% of your score is based on utilization, 15% of your score is based on length of credit history, 10% of your score is based on new credit or inquiries, and 10% of your score is credit mix.

FICO 9… What You Should Know…

FICO’s newest credit score is known as FICO 9. This new score includes many changes from prior FICO models.

One change is that medical collections are no longer scored the same as regular collections, they are weighted much less. FICO anticipates that a consumer with the median credit score of 711 whose only negative collection issue is medical-related will see their score increase by 25 points.

Other changes to the model will better gauge the ability of a consumer who has a limited credit history, known in the business as a thin file, to repay a prospective debt. These types of people might not have a score in the past, but will now with the new version.

Non-traditional credit, such as your residential rental history, will be taken into consideration. This means that consumers who have little to no credit history but pay rent on time will get a boost.

Paid-off and settled collections will be ignored with FICO 9. Under the previous FICO model, if you let an account go into collection, your credit score would take a hit for as long as that collection is on your credit report (seven years).

Now, as long as the collection has a zero balance, it will be ignored. This is HUGE as paying off collections used to actually prolong how long the account stayed on your reports and resulted in more damage.

5 Quick Tips to Raise Your FICO Score

Check out these tips to raise your FICO credit scores:

Pay your bills on time and beg for forgiveness if you pay late.

Have lots of positive credit on your report, and make sure you are using it at least every six months, don’t forget a good credit mix.

Have open credit cards, three preferably, and keep your balances very, very low. Also, get the highest credit limit accounts you can get.

If your credit file is new, get added as an authorized user but only on a FAMILY MEMBER’s account.

Do NOT apply for too much credit all at once unless buying a car or home, then you need to do your shopping within a 30-day time period.

Source: https://ebprofessionals.com/ FICO Scores Decoded… published first on https://ebprofessionals.com/

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