Complaint Review: falco-sult-and-company-ps-redmond

My short summary of my experience with Bruce Sult, the managing partner, CPA and Investment Advisor registered with SEC.

I had received numerous letters from Falco Sult, CPA every year since 2009 with an offer to sell or merge my firm with Falco Sult.  After two years of collecting several letters I made a call and discuss with Bruce Sult, the managing partner possible merger of our firms. Bruce was very professional, friendly, kind, and presented himself as an expert due to his extensive experience in doing these type acquisitions. We scheduled a meeting in my office on 11/30/11 at 4pm and two weeks later Bruce requested a meeting with his partner which took on 12/8/11 at 3pm in his Redmond’s office.

From the start I trusted Bruce, and  let him mentor me in the process of merging since this was his area of expertee. Unfortunately, my trust was betrayed and I feel sad that a person with CPA, and Investment Advisor designations is misrepresenting the facts and bluntly bully me to avoid the payments formulated by him in our contract.

Regardless of all disclosed facts such as my relocation, expiration of my lease term, and taking my employee, CPA ,   Bruce had decency after three years in his emailed he accused me of many things that is total fabrication and defaming of facts.

Fortunately, I do have record and will stand for my right so this cannot happen to any other small CPA firms in Seattle areas.

I will list only few examples of his insulting allegations in his email:

Sending letters to my clients and never in good faith attempted to contact them.

 This is a fraudulent statement since Bruce Sult, himself supervised the transitions. On 9/15/12 Bruce stated in his email that we will send the letter to quarterly clients and he marked those clients on an excel worksheet and emailed to me.  On 9/18/12 I sent to Bruce the list of clients where the letter of merger was sent with the date of  9/17/12 at 2:29pm from my email address:ela@ericksoncpa.net.

In addition,  I have sent 188 emails corresponding with the clients about the transition.

I was the one putting pressure on Bruce Sult to work on transition and stated many times that I will be leaving town by the end of September of 2012. Bruce was on vacation until 9/11/12 and did not attend to the transition until 9/12/12 upon return from his lengthy vacation.

 In my email on 8/27/12 I was asking to arrange a meeting with my biggest clients with no reply. He was not in a financial positon to take any steps since he did not made our first down payment until 9/13/12.  Bruce signed the contract on 8/8/12 and had two months to work on the transition which was a reasonable time to attend to his requests.  I was available in town and was only invited once to visit his office on 9/21/12 at 2pm and had a light conversation with one of his employee for 30 minute. It was so strange and shocking that most of his senor staff was golfing when the time was running short.

  I was accused on padding my billings.

This allegation is unjust and Bruce used to intimidate me. It was shocking that professional expert with blue ribbon firm, public trust will use this method to benefit materialy.

All my record was disclosed and provided including my past 10 years detail transactions recorded on Quick books. In my practice the cash and accrual basis revenue were very comparable with immaterial variance,  and Bruce requested to use on  cash basis accounting .  My record was provided few months in advance, reviewed by his two senior employees, and contract was  drafted by him.

  We never received any written authorization from any client that consented to transfer to us as per the agreement,  you did not introduce us to any clients other than 2 corporate clients, and for those reasons you have breached our contract.

 This is a false accusation to stop me from any legal implication against him.

First part of September, 2012 Bruce was on vacation, The last week of September Bruce requested meetings only with three clients and we met with two and would have met the third one but he was on vacation for two weeks.

As an experienced CPA and Investment Advisor and expert in acquiring businesses Bruce Sult should know how to plan the transition. Our contract was executed on August 8^th, of 2012, and we had two months to work on details and I was available for him any time. Bruce Sult was grossly negligent, intentionally omitted to follow the procedures required in merger so he can avoid to pay the sale price as we agreed in our contract. He is highly experienced in this area and took a leading position knowingly looking for loops to cut corners.

 We have already paid you over 1 times billings/collections from the start so as far as I am concerned you owe me $38,472.96.

I had one more check I was going to be sending to you covering 7-1-2015-9-30-2015 of around 3,300 k and I was also going to look to see in 4 th quarter if we collect anything from billings before 9/30/2015, but since you sent me this email, I don’t think it is a good idea to deal with you since you clearly  don’t agree with me. 

 I am happy to finalize our relationship by sending you the check for 3^rd quarter and will consider this matter closed if you agree.

 If feel you need to pursue this as a legal matter, it is your right.  As of now I have paid you close to 180k which as far as I’m concerned is more than fair.  If you decide to pursue this, I will be forced to counter sue and include all the work we were unable to bill for spent on cleaning up prior year errors.  I have plenty of your former clients that will be happy to testify as to how the transition was handled in support of our position that you have breached our contract.   I will also be forced to write a letter to the Washington State Board of Accountancy documenting the deficiency of some of your work.

This is a threat and very unprofessional coming from a highly reputable firm.  This is harassment and typical for oppressor/intimidator  to scare me so I will stop the collection. IF he is innocent why even bother to offer  7K.

  Bruce Sult breached the contract, was late on many payments, did not provide a detail of invoices billed to clients from my firm and now made an offer that is 100% in his favor.

He had planned this from the beginning, at first started with smooth  talk, then pretending to be so busy with this small transactions, not checking or attending to detail, neglecting clients’ needs and now refusing to pay the balance due.

I questioned how many other small CPA firms have experienced something similar to this.