First of all I am a former tax preparer at Instant Tax Service (Inglewood). I worked in one of thier Kiosks (NIX and Ace Check Cashing) for 2 years. I left because of all the fraudulent activity and now work honestly with H&R Block in Long Beach. I always go back as a "potential" customer just to see how they are doing things each year. I was told some unusual information from a couple of the new and over worked employees.
Instant Tax Service is the fourth largest tax franchise in the US. It is the largest growing small franchise in the US. Their biggest franchisees are three people in Inglewood Zak, Rudy, and Henock (Kenny). (They are actually very nice people, just cut throat businessmen/woman)
Unfortunately this year they are headed into big trouble. Because of all the fraud and cutting corners that they and their employees do to make it seem like their customers will get high refunds faster than other companies, they basically put Santa Barbara Bank out of business last year.
This means that they are no longer able to offer Instant Rapid Anticipation Loans (IRALs 10 minute loans) or Rapid Anticipation Loans (RALs 12-48 hour loans) through any bank that does business with the franchise. To work around this they are using another company called Pacific Tax Service (a small family owned company in Long Beach) to transmit RALs for thier ICL customers, and use fraudulent EFINs, which use fake addresses. They use more than one EFIN in each and every store with fake addresses.
Thier mother company is unaware of their secret dealings with Pacific Tax Service and if they found out they might be in breach of thier contract.
This is funny cause one night they were all working late and I just walked in and talked to one of the Pacific Tax Service employees and they told me everything that was going on cause they thought I was an employee.
Henock (Kenny) was walking around the place yelling at everyone and giving everyone a different task every five minutes and nothing ever got accomplished. And you can tell their employees hate him.
I just kept walking by casuallym, pretending to go to the bathroom, and no one noticed me.
I walked near the back door to the office and thier employees were outside smoking and getting drunk with coronas and some hard liquor. One employee even drove home drunk. I saw a bottle of corona on pretty much every persons desk including the owners. The employees were talking about how terrible it was to work their and talking about how illegal the business was and such. They were also talking about how incompetent Henock (Kenny) is and that its all his fault that they started doing all this illegal stuff and he was dragging everybody down with him.
I went to a different office the next night and saw an employee using two different tax softwares, this was on Imperial, near Avalon. One is called Drake and the other is called Taxwise. I also heard someone mention Crosslinx or something. While I was there they were transmitting returns with last paycheck stubs. Calling something called locateW2 support and he would go online and get Federal Employee Identification Numbers.
If thats not illegal I don't know what is. I also heard an employee at a location on Martin Luther King Blvd talking on the speaker phone so I thought I'd listen in to the conversations. Their boss was telling them to tell customers who wished to cancel to tell them that their returns were already submitted to the IRS (even without having the W2).
The worst part is the fees, most places charge about 200 dollars for a ral, but they charge 500-600 dollars, no matter how small your refund is. The years I worked their they told me to tell the customers that those were the banks fees and ours was like 58 dollars.
The biggest issue is that 50-60% of thier customers and employees are audited by the IRS every year. And they used a program called W2 Maker (or something like that) to generate fake W2s yet they tell their employees not to accept fake W2s from customers.
This business is such an evil illegal scam. They should all be locked up and thrown away for tax fraud. I'm so glad I left long before it got as bad as it is now.
After this I am going to file a complaint to the IRS and the corporate branch and hopefully proper action will be taken.
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