In October 2011, I had been working on a Tax and Bankruptcy Outline, as well as a power point which was turning out to be huge! At the time of this writing we would have been at 2 weeks out from the presentation date and at that point I became positive that there would not have been enough time. I would have liked to have had a long lead time on this because of its breadth. I would have also liked to have had BOE/EDD/FTB insolvency experts, but as they are in Sacramento, there is zero chance for them to travel here. The topic of this presentation is near and dear to me, but especially because it encompasses bankruptcy code section 505 in addition to tax issues on bankruptcy estate formation; discharge, and more, its just not enough advance time to make a good and complete presentation. If I am ever able to finish the outline to my satisfaction, and if I decide not to lecture on the topic, I'll simply put it in the library on this website.
One brief conversation last time was my question posed to the attendees as to "what would be the effect of having these less often -- would you (attendees) be more likely to attend?" Everyone assumed a quizzical look and kind of said "no, not really". As a result, I am interpreting this as "doing the regular thing, but less often" is not a motivator. So, I believe that a better result might be a more spectacular presentation with a lot more advance time to get more attendance.
I still like the Cardinal Pacific Educational facilities. I think however that to take advantage of an opportunistic, higher popularity lecture, that the times might need to be scheduled to take advantage of opportunities, and thus will appear to be seemingly random. For example, (and given the current topic), if I knew that a state insolvency specialist might be travelling to LA for a weekend, then doing a full blown presentation with that person on a Friday night (after encouraging them to come down a little early) might be just the thing. Likewise, getting a tax court judge in to speak on a particular topic would require accessing the court's LA calendar, contacting the Judge far in advance, and scheduling on a night which would be in-between two docket days, which might be more likely to fall on a randome Tuesday or Wednesday.
Well, the October 2011 lecture represented the 24th lecture in the series. The first 18 were presented free of charge and the last six or so had a small $10 charge for attendance. It started as an experiment to see if the public would like to join tax professionals in a non-sales environment to delve into the real issues and to overhear the conversation between tax professionals on a number of topics. This aspect of the lecture series did not work -- I had hoped for a 50-50 split on attendees (when the lecture was free). It has shown me that the public, when it comes to tax, --doesn't want to hear about it, doesn't want to know, doesn't want to be bothered.
I am going to spend the next few months trying to finish the outline, write some more articles for the Long Beach Reporter, and try and finally complete some Japanese and Russian pages for this site. (as of January 2011, only the Japanese Page has been completed).
Please check back with this page for the next event.
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