I deal with a professional who does her job very well; I have no complaints. Oddly, though, she began requiring all payment in cash a few years ago. Now, she is an intense believer in woo. For example, she will not lick envelopes, because of the mind control chemicals the government puts in the envelope glue.
So, she is nuts, but she does her job very, very well. I know that she is paranoid about taxes and audits and would never take a questionable deduction, let alone cheat on her taxes.
When she went to cash-only, she told an employee about it. The employee thought I had already been told. Other clients of hers have asked me if I knew why, so I’m not the only curious customer.
TL/DR: What woo-reasons are there for a business person to avoid checks/credit cards?
Perhaps not so much of tax avoidance, but tracking or the possibility of that she wants to avoid. Some people don’t like that the ‘powers that be’ could call up records of financial transactions and find out who is in her life and what she is eating for breakfast etc.
Actually, I totally get the checks thing (I stopped accepting checks 5 years ago due to the number of NSF checks I was receiving). I just find the “cash only” interesting, especially with her being so into woo.
So maybe the woo people do things more on a sliding scale too and that’s easier to manage if it’s cash-based?
/Also, now I want to sell my morals and open a homeopathy store if they’re making that kind of scratch
Thing is, just because something’s woo doesn’t mean it’s not tremendously complicated and tricky. Homeopathic medicine is distilled water made through a long and involved process that’s far trickier to master than the normal process of creating distilled water.
Which raises an interesting question. If I poured some water from my Brita filter into a vial and marketed it as 30x St. Johns Wort or whatever, what legal trouble would I be inviting?
If you have someone who is a professional and also a paranoid delusional kook, and you want to know why she’s behaving delusionally, describing her as professional probably isn’t the best choice. Presumably the fact that she has paranoid delusions is going to offer more explanatory value than the fact that she’s a professional.
She may buy stuff from people who only take cash, and it saves a couple trips to the bank if she can just keep it in a big bin down in the basement. Plus, if she gets enough cash in the bin, she can play Scrooge McDuck and dive into it.
You can be denied a checking account if you have check fraud or really bad credit in your past. In fact, you can even be denied as a signer on someone else’s account if things get bad enough.
Without a checking account, there’s no way to take credit cards, though the same credit/fraud problems would prevent you from getting a merchant service account anyway. It’s relatively expensive to keep cashing checks at payday loan places or the like.
If there’s a woo explanation, though, it might not make any sense or be particularly widespread. One of my clients told me that paying attention to money disrupted her psychic abilities. Another wanted a tax return finished only after a certain planetary alignment had passed. I helped another recover thousands of dollars in checks turned over to the state’s unclaimed property, but we had to take them to the bank for her because she was convinced that doing it herself would get her mugged.
Well, here’s the thing. She does her job very well. She keeps quiet about the woo in general. It was only after knowing her for years that she opened up and told me about her . . . beliefs. I was all :eek: , but I couldn’t see taking my business elsewhere, because she is very good at what she does.
If you want to perform an experiment to see if it’s woo, or perhaps extreme caution, ask her if you can write a check before services are delivered. She can deposit it, and know that it clears, before handing you your financials.
We’ve picked an accountant for corporate/business/personal use twice (second time after the first one closed out her small client list to concentrate on big corporation work). Both times, we talked to 3 or 4 and passed on the ones that were rabid anti-taxers or gummint-eeeevil types. It’s not a profession in which I want my provider to be afraid of or out to beat the supervising agencies, especially not for stupid, illogical or paranoid reasons. But g’damn if there aren’t a lot of such in the CPA/FA industry. Weird.
I wouldn’t trust yours, no matter how “good” she is. One day you’re going to find out she “helped” you in ways that leave you wearing a barrel, all for the best freaked-out, woo-ey, paranoid reasons. “But I *had *to hide that income… ***They ***were going to spend it on chem-trails over elementary schools!”
It’s a deceptive trade practice; you are engaging in deliberately false advertising. The fact that 30x anything is no more likely to have a stray molecule of the substance than the stuff out of your Brita doesn’t matter. You are asking people to give you money based on the fact you specifically distilled and re-distilled something that started with St. John’s Wort. The fact that such intense distillation likely results in none of the substance being left is not a secret; the manner in which homeopathy works is fact, and reasonably know by the consumer, so it’s not really fraud. If you make your “St. John’s Wort Homeopathic Remedy” stuff without engaging in that process, you ARE committing fraud.
To use an analogous situation, suppose I sold you an original “Jurassic Park” movie poster bearing the signature of Steven Spielberg. You pay me a pretty penny for it on the assuming it’s legitimate, only to find out I lied to you and I actually signed it myself (spoiler: I am not Steven Spielberg.) But I argue in court that my forging of Speilberg’s signature is an essentially perfect replica; I can do his signature as well as he can It doesn’t matter. I’ve defrauded you.
I didn’t mean to suggest fire. I’m just suggesting that when someone with paranoid delusions comes up with a new paranoid delusion, you needn’t look for an explanation deeper than “because she is delusional”.
We’re not talking about someone who believes in homeopathy or can’t figure out that vaccines don’t cause autism. This is someone who believes someone is conspiring to control her mind with stamps. That’s a pretty profound delusion indicating she’s quite unhinged from reality. You can’t expect there to be some rational reason to avoid checks.
Ok, it wasn’t the point of my post, but never the less I do think she shouldn’t be doing your accounting.