A Taxing Season : Attorney Helps Those Who Dread the IRS

Few look forward to April 15, but Joyce Rebhun’s clients dread it.

Rebhun, who calls herself a tax therapist, is a Westside tax attorney, CPA and historian of taxation whose specialty is nonfilers. With extensions or without, the majority of us manage to get our tax returns in, even if it means racing to the post office as midnight approaches. But the tormented, tax-wise, who seek out Rebhun have let the deadline pass once, twice, even 20 or 30 times.

Many of the more than 7,000 clients Rebhun has counseled in four years of tax therapy are all but phobic about the IRS, she says. And the longer they wait to straighten out their tax problem, the more fearful they become.

“They miss one year for a legitimate reason, say, they have a divorce, and they’re afraid they’re going to jail,” she says. Some, including a stockbroker she worked with, compound the problem by refusing to open any mail they receive from the IRS. A few hard cases go underground to avoid discovery by the IRS, giving up a permanent address to move in with friends or family, quitting employers who report their earnings to the IRS to take jobs that pay them under the table in cash, living little better than fugitives.

“They are lost causes,” she says, “unless someone brings them back.”

Rebhun, 46, won’t accept clients she suspects of trying to defraud the IRS. “No one comes here who is a tax evader or a cheat,” she says.

Her clients, who owe an average of $100,000 to the federal government, are typically people with personal problems that have left them too paralyzed or preoccupied to deal with their tax obligation. According to Rebhun, more than 10% have been referred by a psychiatrist or other therapist. On a bad week, half a dozen clients tell her that they want to kill themselves.

Their tax mess is often the least of their problems. “Often we don’t realize the terrific crosses people are living under,” Rebhun observes. Her files, which include client’s sworn statements to the IRS explaining why they didn’t file in a timely fashion, are filled with anguish as well as tax forms.

Flowers come to her Ladera Heights office every week from a gay man who stopped filing returns after he discovered he was HIV-positive and was dumped by his lover. Rebhun says she was so moved she now volunteers her services to AIDS patients, many of whom can’t get medical benefits until they straighten out their tax problems.

Almost a third of her clients are recovering from alcohol or drug abuse. They often send Rebhun the pins they receive in Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs to mark 90 days of sobriety. Other clients let tax deadlines slip by while suffering from depression, cancer or some other serious illness, the delayed impact of child abuse, the aftermath of a divorce or a bankruptcy, the death of a child.

Like other tax experts, Rebhun advises her clients on tax law and leads them through the maze of IRS paper work. But unlike most other tax preparers, she also offers them emotional support. Rebhun says that it wasn’t until she developed and overcame her own drinking problem that she realized the fragility--and heroism--of people dealing with addiction and other personal crises.

“The normal CPA, the normal attorney will not nurture you,” she says. “Often people in trouble need to be nurtured, at least to get the process started.” She is constantly reminding her clients “they don’t have to be paranoid. There is hope.”

At times, she says, she thinks of herself, not as a tax therapist, but as a tax minister. “It’s almost become a mission,” she says of her practice. “It’s Lourdes West. You’re here for a miracle.”

The miracle is often worked in mundane ways. Her clients’ lives may be in disarray, but they typically have kept the documentation they need to file complete returns for past years. As she reminds, these are people who, whatever their problems, want to do the right thing.

Rebhun often sits down with the client over a cup of coffee as the client details the reasons for not filing. She doesn’t probe, but she helps them word their explanatory affidavits as persuasively as possible, trying to read them over from an IRS point of view and recommending changes. She makes sure that death certificates and other documents that support a client’s often woeful account are attached.

Rebhun charges $400 for an initial consultation, which is often enough to solve the client’s problem, she says.

Formerly an attorney with the IRS in her native Pittsburgh, Pa., Rebhun does not believe the IRS is a huge, uncaring monolith. “I realize their kindness, their compassion,” she says. Rebhun claims that 90% of her clients are relieved of the penalty part of their tax bill, which can amount to 40% of the total.

Even for those whose lives are tranquil, the tax process is complicated, the tax therapist acknowledges. Rebhun has personally heard the interior siren that whispers “Why bother?” at tax time.

Resist it, she advises.

“We think if we hide in the closet, it will go away,” she says. “It doesn’t. In the words of my mother, ‘The jails aren’t big enough for people who don’t pay their taxes.’ You just have to file.”