I Left Corporate Bankruptcy to Fight for Small Business Owners

I spent two years making sure GM, Ford, and Chrysler got paid what they were owed...in full, while the small vendors got one cent on the dollar.

After two years of work on a $900 million bankruptcy, it came down to two numbers.

General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler received 100 cents on the dollar. The small vendors who had supplied that business for years, who had extended credit and sent invoices and waited, got one cent.

After all that, after all that hard work, the small business owners got one cent on the dollar. To make this very clear, if a small business was owed $100, they were paid back $1.

I want to be clear about something before I go any further: the automakers aren't villains in this story. They're enormous companies that do a lot of really good in Detroit, and they had secured legal claims that got satisfied. That's how it works.

But I was the one who'd spent two years working on that case. And when it was over, I sat with the result and I felt...

Nothing.

No relief. No sense of accomplishment. No moment where I thought: what I did mattered.

There was no one on the other end of the win. No phone call with a business owner who could finally sleep. No face attached to the outcome.

I had spent two years in service of entities so large that the people running them would never know my name and the people most affected by the outcome, the small vendors who got one cent on the dollar, I never met most of them either.

I didn't know their names. I didn't know what their businesses meant to them, or what they were going to do next or the devastation they felt when they learned that they got nothing after working with the supplier for years.

On the one end I felt terrible for the small businesses, and on the other, when it came to the car companies getting paid back in full, I felt, nada, not a thing, no sense of accomplishment.

What I realized was I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to talk to the business owners when I helped them. I wanted to know the person. To see and feel their sense of relief. I wanted to finish the case knowing that the business owner was going to be okay.

That's not what I was getting from corporate bankruptcy work and once I realized what I actually wanted, I knew I had to make a change.

So I pivoted to something where I could feel and see the difference I was making with my work.

I have to admit, the pivot was not strategic.

A friend of mine was doing tax controversy work — representing individuals and small business owners in front of the IRS — and he was willing to teach me the law and the business. That was the door that opened. I walked through it.

It wasn't a defining moment where I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. It was a practical opportunity that happened to align with what I'd realized I actually wanted. And I took it.

Now, I've been working tax controversy — IRS collections, installment agreements, penalty abatement, payroll tax cases — for over a decade and it's exactly the work I was describing when I said I wanted to be able to feel the change I was making for people.

The clients I work with are almost always scared. Most of them have been avoiding the problem for months, sometimes years, because they didn't know what to do and were afraid that knowing would make it worse.

They're small business owners and self-employed people who are good at what they do and ended up in a situation they don't understand, dealing with an institution, the IRS, that's the largest and most powerful collection agency on the planet and plays this game every day and knows they don't.

A few months ago, I sat across from a business owner — I'll call him David, who had been carrying, and worrying about, IRS debt for four years. He hadn't opened notices in about 3 of those years.

He couldn't face it so he stuck his head in the sand and hoped it would magically go away, even though he knew that wasn't realistic, knowing that it was only a matter of time before something catastrophic happened. He came in because his accountant made him.

I went through his transcripts, his financials, his timeline. The situation was serious, but it wasn't what he thought it was. There was a path. We talked through it for about an hour.

At the end of the meeting, he finally saw a way out. I was able to describe what he was facing and how we would go about resolving it. He sat back and literally let out a sigh of relief.

For four years he had been dreading dealing with the IRS. After an hour of discussion he could see a way out.

Being in the room and hearing his sigh of relief, that was what I was looking for when I left corporate bankruptcy work, and I found it in tax controversy.

If you're reading this because you're dealing with your own IRS situation — or because you've been putting off dealing with it — I want you to know that the fear is almost always worse than the actual problem. Not because the problem isn't real. It is. But because the IRS collections process has rules, and most people don't know them, and knowing them changes everything.

If you're a CPA or an attorney who works with small business clients, I understand that sending someone to a tax attorney is a referral you have to be confident in. If you're someone in David's position, I can help. The person I just described in that meeting — that's the experience I want you or your clients' to have.

Shoot me a DM on LinkedIn or visit weisberg.tax to get started.

➥ Contact Attorney Stephen A. Weisberg for a free Tax Debt Analysis.

Contact Me Here: https://www.weisberg.tax/contact-1

Email: s.weisberg@weisberg.tax

Phone/Text: (248) 971-0885

Address: 300 Galleria Officentre, Suite 402, Southfield, MI 48034