Complaint Review: Actuarial Systems Corporation - Alan Gould - Alan & Bonnie Cohen

An update, and because it is Thanksgiving weekend:

I am thankful for living in America, today the land of pick and choose because although we know the right thing to do we instead choose lies, fraud and obfuscation. But I do strongly believe that can be changed. We are today told we are responsible only for ourselves, but I believe we are not only responsible for ourselves but our families and most importantly our children who are our future.

I do understand we cannot change the past but am thrilled to hope to be part of the process to change the future and do so by rising above my fears and the many threats of doom if I did speak out, and so I have and continue to speak out.

I am thankful for sites such as Ripoff Report , for had I put up my own website, I fear it would have been obscured or removed. I am sorry if Bonnie Cohen is ashamed, but having worked for Alan Cohen for over eight years myself and knowing them for more than 20 years, I and others who have worked with him know he has no conscience.

I am most thankful for a beautiful, intelligent kind and loving daughter who despite the antics and anguish caused by her crazy parents is now at Cornell University.

I am thankful for my former spouse for leaving our marriage of 21 plus years and his mistress Ellen Quinlan for taking him in and eventually marrying him and moving to West Palm Beach Florida starting The Pension Studio and 144 West Merrimack Realty LLC with him so he would have no assets in his name. He has no conscience.

I am thankful for stated income loans, for I never would have been able to buy my house without one, but am sorry I am not able to keep it due to the debt I was left with after the divorce and the specious judgment. I do have two writs of execution for back child support and alimony due and am entitled to a third for other expenses due but since they are not worth the paper they are written on have given up trying to collect as most women do.

I am thankful for all my attorney Paula S. Glickstein did for me. With my insistent prodding for a market valuation she hired Bruce L. Ross & Company to value ASC and came up with a unique method that combined a market valuation $9,202,000 with an Income approach valuation $394,537. The income approach and cash approach were used by Alfred Warsavsky, CPA & ABV and Leonard Cohen CPA of the firm White Zuckerman Warsavsky Luna & Wolf Certified Public Accountants neither meets the requirements of the uniform standards of professional appraisal practice, and neither approriate for this type of business, but were used in order to bring the value down.

Funny Paula did write in a memorandum to her file (in the records I requested long after the trial) dated months before the trial that she finds the disconnect between life with Alan Gould, and how much she (me) is going to get paid, incredible. And that the proprietary software is worth its weight in gold.

Makes me feel warm and fuzzy too, after writing letters pointing out Cynthias unethical conduct and conduct in violation of The State Bar of California and rules of evidence by submitting evidence long after the trial was over that Judge Marjorie Steinberg took into account, that Cynthia C. Berman (funny my complaint against her is not shown on the state bar website that would list any complaints against an attorney) would write in an email to Paula dated Sun, April 3, 2005, perhaps we can call the bank jointly this week to push things along, so the $ can be disbursed and we can withdraw before this case blows up again..Cynthia.

It is written in the final judgment that I cost the respondent extra fees by hiring my own forensic and that the fictitious valuation was more believable. Paula wrote me that one would have to be on drugs to think this judgment was fair. I can only wonder what the value would really be if the difference that is reported on IRS tax returns and what is actually received by the corporation was included?

The notice of ruling I received to the motion I filed in 2006 to have the judgment set aside due to fraud was denied for lack of facts and on the bottom of each page marked, NOT FOR REPRODUCTION PER GOVERNMENT CODE 69954(D).

I am thankful that we live in a country where accountants have the freedom to pick and choose what method they use for valuing businesses and that California Board of Accountancy nor American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) who do not promulgate a method of valuation for family law purposes have no problem with a valuation if a judge does not, as I found out with my complaint to them. They had no problem with a AICPA certified ABV - "Accredited in Business Valuation not being able to value with the market value method, a National retirement plan software company, ASC, see asc-net.com, that touches more than half of all the 401(k) accounts in the nation, because it was too small.

I know our current system of double accounting is the shame of our nation, known by the IRS and is just as shameful as the hidden 401(k) fees reported recently in headlines and known to be hidden since a 1997 Dept of Labor report on Fees and Expenses and yet nothing is done about the problems. Double accounting is not available to working Americans. It is only available to corporations like ASC, who use this double accounting and excessive payment of perquisites to avoid paying the taxes they legitimately owe the government and guess who is paying the hidden 401(k) fees? Yes, the same hard working Americans, you and I.

Even the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress concluded that corporations use differences between tax rules and accounting rules to avoid paying taxes on their profits. Take Enron, for example. Enron reported to its shareholders that it earned $3.625 billion in profit between 1996 and 2000. It then turned around and reported to the IRS that it had only earned $76 millions in profit during those years. This double accounting defrauded tens of thousands of shareholders and pensioners out of billions of dollars, for the cooked books were discovered to have masked questionable investment procedures.

In a study, by Harvard University economist Mihir A. Desai it was calculated that the difference between the profits that corporations reported to the Internal Revenue Service in 1998, and the profits that accountants certified in the annual reports the companies issued to their stockholders. The difference between them was a staggering: $154 billion in 1998. The result about one-sixth of a trillion dollars hidden by accountants sleight-of-hand from the IRS. The federal government would have collected another $54 billion that should have been paid in taxes.

How do these corporations get away with two sets of books? How can they tell their stockholders they are raking in profits, and then turn around and tell the IRS that they had such a bad year that they will pay little or nothing in taxes?

Dont ask our Politicians, I have written among others, Rep. Henry Waxman - 30th District of California, United States Senator Dianne Feinstein, California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (His office did write me back that I should contact the Commission on Judicial Performance, which I did to no avail the response I received of course is Confidential under California Constitution, Article VI, Section 18 and Commission Rule 102), they are all obviously more concerned with reducing taxes on the wealthy.

Eliminating specious family law judgments due to corporate double bookkeeping and valuations that contain departures from generally accepted accounting principles, would be to require corporations to use similar accounting in both their corporate reports and the IRS filings. This would be sensible family law court and tax reform, but I know will not be forthcoming any time soon.

I am thankful that I live in America and am free to write and to read books such as A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, where I learned that the distribution of income and wealth need not be equal if an unequal distribution is to everyones advantage.

I am thankful that I now understand that just like the politicians in our government, the accounting and law professions have such necessarily inexact codes of professional conduct and ethics so as to convince the public that there is fairness and justice and for the public to perceive we live in a civil society but I believe that the obfuscation practiced in those professions today has completely undermined their credibility and that of our Family law legal system.

I am thankful that I checked into my social security benefits and now know that if I become disabled, I need 27 credits of work, and 20 of those credits had to be earned in the last 10 years so I currently do not have enough credits in the right time period to be covered by social security disability.

I am thankful that I am able to work and in spite of the unethical and unprofessional conduct of Ms. Hunnewell of Hunnewell, Pressman and Associates who did prepare a vocational evaluation that was court ordered during the divorce proceedings because I had not worked in some years.

Paulette Hunnewell did call firms and pretend to be a head hunter or employment agent representing me even indicated that I was sitting in her office with her at the time of the telephone calls and was seeking employment for me, for a particular annual salary (far less than I was eventually employed for) and did mention my name in at least one of the conversations she had with prospective employers she contacted.

I am even more grateful for the health care coverage through my job, because I was diagnosed with probable MS (no family history of such, and I believe solely due to the stress of the last few years) and because I am now uninsurable otherwise. The state of our Healthcare needs national attention as sadly the number of Americans without health insurance continues to grow.

I am thankful that I am blessed with the optimism to try to change the tide of unmitigated greed, fraud and unethical behavior, too common today on A Simple Choice Network. It will soon be on facebook and the website asc-net.info.