Multi-Tasking Taxes

Need a manicure? Along Pico Boulevard, just west of downtown, beauty salons will file both your fingernails and your tax returns. Getting married? Here, notaries public in tiny storefronts marry customers -- or divorce them -- then switch desks to file tax returns for the newlyweds or those newly filing single.

In the Pico-Normandie neighborhood, income tax preparers are as plentiful as pupuserias and panaderias, and the competition for W-2 forms is as creative as it is keen.

Auto insurance agencies, cellphone vendors and even a local church will help you get covered, get connected and hear a sermon while filing tax returns (or praying for a refund).

What to the casual observer might seem like odd pairings are natural to an immigrant community where business relationships are built on intimacy and trust. Here, entrepreneurs continue a home-country tradition of filing the paperwork for blue-collar immigrants who are bewildered, illiterate or unused to the workings of American bureaucracy. And they do it, generally, for less than $50.

At New Image Just for You salon, Gloria Hernandez, 40, prepares income tax returns and immigration papers, performs marriages, sends money and packages to Honduras and books flights.

A few feet away, Maria Josefina Lobos, 36, brushes on highlights and tints, applies the popular Japanese straightening perm, cuts hair and shapes acrylic nails.

“Everyone who comes in comments on it, because it’s so different,” Lobos said of the business pairing. “But it has worked out well for both of us. Now my customers are hers, and her customers become mine. Oh, and she does my taxes; I do her hair. Doesn’t it look nice?”

Each is a single mother supporting two children and relatives in Central America. Working seven days a week, Lobos also is putting a younger brother through college in El Salvador.

At times, the shop sounds as if an economics class blundered into an episode of “Sex and the City.”

“Maria! Isn’t it time to rinse it out?” an anxious woman in a plastic bonnet pleads. “I want my hair to be golden, not white!”

Nearby, couples implore Hernandez to find more deductions to lighten their tax bills.

“It is the question I get the most, from everyone,” Hernandez said, shaking her head. “My customers understand the process pretty well; they just don’t know how they’re going to pay the tax bill.”

Nearby, at 2707 Pico, Flor Campero flits between two computers at the front of Campero Insurance -- one for travel bookings, the other for notarizing, paying bills, writing invitations, filling out immigration forms and preparing tax returns.

Campero came to the U.S. from El Salvador in 1986, by herself. At age 21, she never dreamed that any place could be so rich.

For a time, everyone in a uniform -- even letter carriers -- frightened Campero, reminding her of the police back home.

Then she received her first letter.

“I hugged it and kissed it and cried over it and ran outside into the street, I was so happy,” she said, wiping her eyes.

She set out to become a letter carrier but couldn’t land a job with the Postal Service. Even now, the rejection makes her weep.

“I have a good business and I am grateful for it,” she said, crying. “It’s just that I couldn’t think of anything more beautiful than to be someone who would bring letters to people.”

Campero took classes at H&R; Block and worked with that agency for a time. Then she read books to learn how to become a travel agent. Soon after, she became a notary public; she points to the licenses and certificates hanging on the wall.

No lone proprietor could survive in the neighborhood by offering a mainstream model of business, Campero said. Any edge over the competition, including using her husband’s last name -- Campero -- helps. Campero is the name of a wildly popular chain of chicken restaurants founded in Guatemala, which has eight franchises in the Los Angeles area.

“It’s sort of like if I were KFC Insurance,” she said.

New customers inevitably ask if she also owns the restaurants. “I tell them, ‘No I don’t,’ but then I say, ‘Why don’t you sit down and let’s see how I can help?’ ”

Working 12 hours a day, Campero always keeps an eye on the competition.

“We all know each other; we’re rivals,” she said with a smile.

Just a few doors down, at 2646 Pico, Tape Insurance offers a full range of travel services, marriages and divorces, bankruptcy and income tax preparation.

And across the street from Campero, customers at the Guatemala Village Central American Palace can buy music and crafts from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico; shop for crosses, candles and statuettes of the Virgin Mary; and pick up multivitamins and healing herbs -- all while having their taxes done.

The powerhouse of the storefront services on Pico is a church that has served as a facilitator and competitor to new entrepreneurs.

For example, Campero learned some of her trade from Getsemani Ministries, which offers the same array of services to both the public and parishioners.

Four years ago, Campero added auto insurance to her services after the church showed her how.

“They are wonderful people,” Campero said. “Even though I’m a competitor, they still showed me how to start a rival business.”

On most nights, Getsemani’s roomy but spare suite of rooms in a large blue-and-white building at 2323 Pico is full. Some come for citizenship classes while others wait for help with tax forms.

In an adjacent room, another group studies the Bible. Side by side, Pastor Josue Mejilla and several parishioners work into the night at computers.

“While we are here to help prepare their taxes, when they come, for us the most important thing is to save the soul,” said Victor Garduno, 31, a member of the church who prepares returns. The cost for tax preparation varies from $30 to $45, depending on the amount of work to be done, and the profits are used to support the ministry.

Everyone who goes to Getsemani for tax preparation is invited to the church, and about 90% of church members have their taxes done there too.

It is not uncommon to see African American and Korean customers waiting for tax services along with the mostly Spanish-speaking customers.

How a church got involved in tax preparation is a straighter plot than it might seem, Mejilla said.

Started in Oxnard in the early 1990s, the church began providing citizenship classes, ultimately helping 600,000 people become citizens. When Mejilla moved to Los Angeles and founded Getsemani, its reputation helped earn the trust of the mostly Central American community in the Pico-Normandie area.

“In our community, what matters most is trust,” Mejilla said. “As we did in Oxnard, first we began here by helping people obtain their citizenship.

“Now we have helped about 150,000 people here become citizens, and so without any advertising -- no television or radio or newspapers -- we have a good business because of those 150,000.”

Marta Garcia, 43, a Guatemalan and mother of four, went to Getsemani six years ago for a sermon. Soon after, she enrolled in its citizenship classes. After becoming a citizen, she turned to the church for income tax preparation.

“Who can you trust more than God?” Garcia said on a recent Monday night at Getsemani.

“They’re the same people who teach us the parables and about Jesus, so you know there aren’t going to be irregularities and errors,” she said.

“I walk down this street and see all the other signs in the windows for income tax services, but I never even think about going in or asking how much are their prices.”

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Tips on choosing preparers

To legally charge a fee to prepare tax returns, a preparer must be certified by the California Tax Education Council or be a certified public accountant, an enrolled agent or an attorney. The council recommends that consumers conduct a brief interview with prospective tax preparers.

* Ask to see a tax preparer’s credentials.

* Ask to see the surety bond that tax preparers are required by law to have.

* Ask how fees to prepare tax returns are determined.

* Ask if the preparer can be reached year-round.

* Ask if the preparer will sign the tax return.

* Ask if the preparer will store tax information and, if so, for how long.

* Beware of high-interest loans masquerading as “rapid refunds.”