Tax Preparer Earns Bonus: A New Life

After his wife died, there were days when Boris Rapport felt his own death calling.

Then he began preparing income tax returns for Santa Ana’s poorest immigrants.

He helped them claim more than $1 million in tax refunds. And they helped him find a purpose in a life that had seemed to have none.

His once-comfortable life in Brentwood began spiraling down in 1985 when he underwent triple-bypass surgery at the age of 51. Doctors gave him 10 years to live. He and his family moved to Anaheim to reduce the commute to his sales management job with a life insurance company.

On the side, he and his wife, Shirl, ran a tax preparation business, but each year, it shrank a little more. To pull in extra money, he taught finance, investment and taxation at Fullerton College.

He was spending as much as $1,500 a month on medicine for himself and his wife, who was suffering from increasingly severe epilepsy. Following her worst epileptic episode, she suffered a fatal heart attack in December 2000. After 47 years together, the loss seemed too much to endure.

Rapport quit his tax business. For the next two years, he sheltered himself, emotionally paralyzed, inside his Anaheim home. “The only thing I could do was vegetate. I couldn’t move. Everything seemed very painful,” he said.

Sitting in his underwear, he watched TV talk shows as letters and newspapers piled up. He stopped bathing regularly. He gained 50 pounds.

He popped 32 pills a day for a variety of ailments, and he could not walk farther than a couple of feet. His stomach ached. He suffered chest pains. At 68, he figured his number was up. Diagnosed as clinically depressed, he leafed through “The Final Exit,” and kept the suicide manual on his nightstand.

Two of Rapport’s three adult children were too far away to help a father with depression, heart and intestine conditions and arthritis. One daughter, Pam Hope, lectured him that there was still a lot to live for, despite the constant pain.

She nagged him to get out. Maybe, Hope thought, he could volunteer at the food bank where she worked. In February 2003 she took him there, to the Community Action Partnership in Garden Grove, thinking he could fix computers.

But he was drawn instead to something more familiar, the prospect of preparing taxes at the food bank, which was looking to expand its services.

Preparing taxes “really saved my dad’s life,” Hope said. “He was really at the end. He felt so empty and sad. He did not think it was going to be fulfilling. But within a few days, we could all see a change.”

His new boss, Jerry Sanders, got him a haircut and a clean, collared shirt. Rapport said he became surprisingly aware of his own smile and it felt good.

Rapport and the food bank’s tax-preparation program matched perfectly. He would be paid the minimum wage, $6.75 an hour, as part of a senior training program and he would bring years of experience to the job.

Rapport began the job stoically. He completed returns meticulously, but in silence. He took the documents and information from his clients, many Spanish-speaking. They were the sort of people he had seen tend lawns or serve food in restaurants, but about whom he had never given much thought. To him, they had been faceless workers.

But now he saw them up close every day, and relationships formed.

“I realized that we were the same in many ways,” said Rapport. “We all have the same aspirations. They care about their children and the future. They work hard and they want to make their lives better.”

The refunds did not surprise him as much as the clients’ reactions. “I knew from the beginning that there would be refunds -- big refunds. Seeing the pleasure of the clients’ faces was a surprise. It was a pleasure,” Rapport said.

In the last 14 months, Rapport said, 350 of his clients have qualified for a total of more than $1 million in refunds, in some cases reflecting several tax years.

At least, Rapport said, he is no longer entertaining death’s call. He has purpose, and something to do almost every day of his renewed life.

“In private practice, the payoff was a check. It was a referral. It might have been entertainment,” Rapport said. “Now, it’s a smile.”