Testimonials
I heard about Natalya from an advertisement on Craigslist.com. We were having problems with the IRS, and based on her bio, and her advertisement that she was local, it was convenient for me. I liked that she was an accountant and a tax attorney so she would understand better. She was able to negotiate with the IRS and the state and the outcome went much better than I was expecting. Natalya is very detailed, she knows the law, and is able to deal with IRS agents – it’s very difficult. She knows what she’s doing and she gives good suggestions. When I hired Natalya I stopped getting any harassing communications, mail, all that stuff (from the IRS). I would and have recommended her to a client already. Natalya is very good at what she does. She is knowledgeable and very timely. One time an urgent issue came up and even though she was on vacation she was able to help me. That was very good.
– Richard W.
My wife is a legal aid attorney and she in the past used to work with Matt Williamson. She asked Matt’s advice and he recommended Natalya.
The issue of what Natalya’s been dealing with has been about my income from abroad. I am a British citizen married to a US citizen. We had been using a CPA for several years but she had not dealt with any situation where there was a non US citizen living in the US from abroad, so she never informed us about the need about reporting my income under FBAR so it was only at the point when she did inform us that we realized that we got it wrong. When I talked her about it, the mutual agreement was that since it was her mistake it didn’t feel right for us to continue with her and also that it wasn’t something she was experienced with and so it would be in our best interests to contact someone who was a tax attorney as well as a CPA.
Initially we had no reservations but later on I did, but I want to explain it because it is important. About six months into the process, it became clear that provisionally we were going to get fined about $70,000 and Natalya was advising that we accept it rather than fight it. My wife found another attorney with experience in IRS work who we went to for a second opinion. This attorney’s second opinion was that although it is a complex case and there are no easy answers, she felt like it was worth fighting, and we should come out of the voluntary disclosure program. This made me think very hard. I told Natalya about it. Natalya sent me IRS documentation and told me to go to the IRS website and to read for myself these IRS conclusions with complex cases like mine. So I did that, and I concluded that I wanted to go with Natalya’s advice even though she was the less experienced attorney, because it seemed to me that her advice was more rooted in what the IRS was saying and the cases they were citing. I still think that would have been the right thing to do regardless, but then a few weeks after that, Natalya became aware that the IRS was changing its policy. And there was an option now to put in an appeal against their ruling. It wouldn’t put us at any worse risk and could actually significantly reduce our fine. So we put in the appeal and we found out that they accepted our appeal and our fine was reduced from $70,000 to $11,000. We knew that by going into the voluntary disclosure program that there was a good chance that we were going to have to pay our fine and at that point we were talking about $50,000, so I chose to go into the program so that it would be no worse than that…So when we found out the fine was $70,000, there was some disappointment but it wasn’t major. To get a fine of $11,000 was very much exciting and much better than I expected.
What I liked about working with Natalya is that she is a human being and very approachable. She was clearly very busy, but she was flexible with her times with us and would take phone calls at 7 or 8 in the evening. That flexibility was important.
One other thing I would like to add – we hired her to sort out a problem with my company but that involved her taking over our annual accounts and an issue came up which was related to my wife’s foreclosure before we were married. We received in 2012 a significant payment as part of a national settlement of foreclosures and so the question was whether or not that payment was taxable and I thought it was, but Natalya investigated and made it clear that in our particular case because of the nature of our finances it was not taxable income so that was also very good news!
I am so grateful (for Natalya’s help) although it was very hard work for Natalya, it was extremely stressful for me to live with. The financial worries of it. So I am awfully grateful.
– John W.
For me, my story begins in an exciting place. When I got audited I was in French Polynesia working on ships because that’s what my wife and I do, we work on ships. We got a phone call in French Polynesia that the IRS was requesting to visit our office for a visit on Monday. We explained that we were working in Tahiti at the time so naturally we didn’t get a lot of pity or sympathy from the IRS agent, and it kicked off a one year odyssey of pain. They immediately extended that to five years and if it hadn’t been for Natalya we would have been wrecked completely. Thank god for her because it didn’t. With that looming over my head, I returned to the United States which was an expensive proposition but I had to do it. When I returned, I got all my paperwork together from my business, organized it as best I could and then I spent several weeks actively searching and interviewing CPAs. I had a CPA but that CPA had not done a good job as I had gotten audited for five years and refused to help with the audit. Interesting to note that some CPAs “don’t do audits”. Literally it’s a thing that some CPAs actually do not do audits! It’s like lawyers who don’t do court room – that was completely unknown to me at the time that there are some CPAs who don’t do audits. It actually exists! Natalya is not one of those. Natalya stands behind her work. What I respect first and foremost about her is that my expectation of a CPA and most people’s expectation of a CPA is that they do a good job so you don’t get audited and then stand behind their work if you do get audited! That is sort of the unwritten expectation of most people when it comes to CPAs but that is not the reality when it comes to CPAs. There are many CPAs that won’t stand behind their own work. How mind-boggling is that? That is a lot of CPAs. Natalya is very different and that is what drew me to her over the long term. Not only was my auditing process with her successful, but the IRS ended up giving me money back in the process. I stayed with Natalya for years after that because of her professionalism and because she stands behind her work.
When you find someone who is good at their job and is a person of integrity that is a person you keep on your team and that is why Natalya has stayed on my team since the day I met her because she is so competent and stands behind her work.
I spent several weeks interviewing CPAs and I went all over the Bay Area. At the time I was in San Jose. I interviewed people from San Jose to Oakland to San Francisco. Started with Google and went from there. I also asked CPAs that I knew so I didn’t blindly research this I went through my connections as well. I put together a list of about 15 CPAs. I am a detail-oriented person and I was scared out of my mind. And so how I react to stress is by lining up my ducks in an exceptionally good row because I wanted to find the very best CPA. Since I am detail oriented, I created a spread sheet and what came out of it was that Natalya was very personable, very easy to talk to and willing and able answer my questions which was another great thing about her since many CPAs will charge you out the nose to even talk to them. Another little fact is that if you are being audited, many CPAs will increase their fees because you are being audited. Kind of like a party planner versus a wedding planner? Many party planners will charge extra because the word wedding is attached. Many CPAs will charge more by the hour because you are being held over a barrel and they know it. Not only was Natalya not doing that she was actually charging less than same people with her same qualifications. And on top of that, she flat out told me even before I hired her that if I have any questions, just call me I don’t charge you a dime asking questions. To this day, if I have any questions that has words like “tax” and “IRS”, I immediately email Natalya. Because she will tell me what to do and she isn’t going to charge me fifty bucks for the privilege of sending her an email or phone call. That means something to me because again it goes back to standing behind your work. She know she does good enough work that she doesn’t have to nickel and dime me. That means something to me and I want to be a part of that and work with someone like that.
In addition, she has a personable personality, she is responsive, has great customer service – all those intangibles so that when I looked at what she was charging and what she could deliver, she had what I called cost to effectiveness ratio. She was the best one. Quite frankly, anyone that looks at her credentials, you are not going to find – and someone who is being audited you are going to look at credentials – you are not going to find a lot of former IRS auditors who are now CPAs. I know that because I researched it. There may be a couple in the Bay Area – but that right there put her at the top of the game. When it comes to the tax arena, Natalya is a veteran. She has been on both sides of the equation. In addition to that she is a lawyer! Not all CPAs are lawyers! In fact very few are. So now you take the fact that she is a lawyer, the fact that she is a CPA and the fact that she was an Auditor and you put all those things together and you got a pretty unique individual. She is at the top one percent of her game. You would think that for all that she would be charging ridiculously high prices because quite frankly of her exclusivity. She has got a track record and paper work to back up a HUGE paycheck but she doesn’t, she charges very reasonable prices.
You are getting an elite person, high customer service for a reasonable rate. And that was what brought me to choose her over every other CPA that I researched in the bay area and she was the clear winner.
My perceptions before working with Natalya were horrible and negative. I had been burned by a CPA. I had gotten audited which means they had found something! Then when I went to the CPA for help, his answer to me was good bye and good luck. Natalya was able to take that negative experience and turn it into a 180. Again that was because she had great customer service, stood behind her work, answered my questions, was there for me and my emotional baggage from being audited – which is a terrifying experience that goes on for six months to a year – and she dealt with all that and she was wonderful about the whole thing. Natalya has completely changed by perception of her industry.
Since hiring Natalya, the biggest change has been that I no longer freak out about taxes. My childhood was such that my parents got divorced and we lost everything. My father was the breadwinner of the family and my mother was a stay at home mom and when they got divorced we were an upper middle class Bay Area family. We lost four real estate properties – all foreclosures, my mom got wrecked with taxes because my dad had cheated on his taxes and went to prison for all sorts of bad things. We ended up living with my mom and my mom had a federal lien against her for something like ten years so to add that on top of being audited my inner child who is now a 30 year old man was like, “Oh God! Oh God! I am going to jail! I am going to lose it all!” Now, I am in a place since working with Natalya that I don’t feel that way anymore. Now when the IRS sends me a letter or when someone mentions taxes, my first reaction is not to cringe, be scared or walk away or pretend that I don’t know or change the topic of conversation, which I notice a lot of people do, because not that many people know a lot about taxes. Taxes is a complicated topic and people don’t like talking about them. Well now I have someone in my back pocket, and someone that is making me smart about taxes because if I get a letter and I don’t get it, I have someone that I can ask and I can get a straight up answer. This makes me smarter and a better client and dramatically improves the relationship I have with my accountant, my finances and with the government – quite frankly – about paying my taxes. I have gone from not wanting to talk about taxes and my finances to being open and engaged in my own finances.
– Greg N.
Someone referred me to Natalya. I contacted her because my taxes were going to be more complicated than I had ever handled before and I didn’t feel comfortable at all doing it myself even thought I am an accountant. So I was seeking out the very best person to do my taxes that I would feel totally confident with and I was looking at people who had good reviews on the internet and also by people who had good experiences. I was talking to a lawyer and I cannot remember his name right now but he is the one who initially told me about her.
Since I am an accountant I never had a reason to hire anyone to do my taxes; I was certainly capable of doing them myself but because I had a home that had gone into foreclosure this was an area that I was not familiar with at all and I wanted somebody who really knew their stuff. I had never been through a foreclosure before and I had heard horror stories from family and friends who had gone through it before me and stories of somebody doing their taxes incorrectly and it coming to haunt them later – and I wanted somebody who knew their stuff inside and out so that I could sleep well knowing that my taxes were done correctly and know that nothing was going to come back to bite me later. Natalya was able to help me with that. Maybe my taxes were complicated for me but I know they weren’t complicated for her. I liked the fact that when I called, Natalya was available. She answered the phone. Usually you expect that someone else will answer the phone and you will never get to the owner of the company but every time I called, she answered personally. It made me feel important. Since Natalya has helped me with my foreclosure, I now have peace of mind. I was happy because I didn’t owe anything. Even though the IRS did come back and act as if I did owe something, I felt like I didn’t have to worry about that because it ended up being an error on the IRS’s part and it was just having that piece of mind having her because the IRS is scary. I’m not a person that likes to fudge numbers, so when I get my taxes done, I want to know that they are done correctly, so I can sleep at night. I think that when somebody is looking for someone to do their taxes and if they understand that their taxes are complicated or out of their own realm of knowledge that it is just safe to hire the best person you can and read the reviews and ask your friends. That’s how I ended up with Natalya because she has great reviews and people like her work – and so do I!
– Ivonne B.
Please remember:
Since I am a California licensed attorney and CPA, the law (and my integrity) require me to let you know that this website can be considered advertisement. The testimonials on this page are from real clients. I can’t guarantee that I will get the same results for you as every client is different. I can promise to give you my best efforts, personal attention and to treat you like a part of my family, and not a quota to fill in a “sales pipeline”.
– Natalya