Our Services

At H B Belle & Associates Tax Service, the careful preparation of your tax return is our top priority. We pride ourselves on giving you personalized and thorough service that meets your business or individual needs.

We partner with other companies to provide a full range of tax and accounting services for our clients and consulting services for special needs.

Tax Services

At H B Belle & Associates Tax Service, we assist our tax clients through efficient compliance and effective planning to help them realize substantial savings.  We use a team approach and focus on timely communication to provide our clients with excellent service. Tax partners and specialists involvement ensure that our clients receive the most experienced technical expertise we have to offer.

We offer the following tax services:

Federal and State Tax Services

Tax Return Compliance

Preparation of federal and state tax returns is the core of our tax services. High-levels of technical and industry specific expertise allow our tax professionals to ensure our clients’ tax returns are prepared efficiently and timely.

Audit & Appeal Representation

Our partners possess the expertise and experience to represent taxpayers before tax authorities.  They understand the dispute resolution and appeals process and work diligently to obtain you the most favorable results. If you are in need of this service, we can connect you with our partners.

Tax Planning Services

Federal Income Tax Planning

Our partners aid businesses with all aspects of federal income tax planning.  This includes implementing federal income tax strategies that maximize savings, increase profits and manage cash flows. 

State and Local Tax Planning

Our partners understands the structural and transactional underpinnings of state and local regulations in ways that allow us to create solutions that mitigate tax liabilities. We provide state and local tax planning in the following areas:

• Income tax
• Franchise tax
• Sales and use tax
• Property tax
• Other miscellaneous taxes

Business Succession Tax Planning

You spent your life building your business and now you want to pass it on to the next generation or sell the value you built.  Our partners advise businesses on the proper succession planning to preserve your family and business legacy while also looking out for potential tax consequences that may result.

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Other Tax Services

Accounting for Income Taxes

Financial accounting for income taxes can be complex.  Our partners have the technical skills and experience to help our clients navigate through these complex requirements and create efficient income tax accounting and reporting.  We also help companies stay up-to-date with regulatory guidance and disclosure requirements. The services we offer allow our clients to minimize year-end surprises and reduce risk related to reporting.  These services include:

• Calculation of tax provisions
• Account for uncertain tax positions
• Analyze current and deferred taxes
• Prepare financial statement footnote disclosures

Tax Updates

We want our clients to stay up-to-date on the latest federal, state and international tax issues.  This can be achieved through webinars, newsletters, website postings and face-face to meetings that we suggest to you. By staying ahead of tax issues, we can communicate how they will impact your operations quickly and address them in a timely manner. 

Individual Tax Services

When it comes to individual taxes, change provides opportunity.  We keep on top of these changes to provide you with the best advice and strategies, especially through planning opportunities.  You can depend on us for objective guidance and personal attention.  We believe in focusing on your long-term financial goals and steering your current needs in a direction to meet them.

Estate and Trust Tax Services

If you have not considered what will happen to your hard earned assets as you age and eventually pass on, you should.  Without an estate plan, the wealth you worked your entire life to build will be distributed according to state law and not according to your wishes. Estate planning is crucial if you want to minimize taxes and distribute as much as possible to your preferred beneficiaries.

Our partners can work with you to design an estate plan customized to your particular needs by utilizing a variety of planning vehicles such as family limited partnerships, trusts and charitable entities. Our partners can assist you by performing the following:

• Review wills and trust instruments.
• Estimate estate taxes and strategize alternatives that may provide tax savings.
• Review business issues including valuation and the transfer and/or disposition of business interests.
• Identify potential liquidity problems caused by federal and state estate taxes for the continued operation of the family business, probate, administration costs, etc.
• Develop a lifetime gifting program using vehicles such as family limited partnerships, charitable trusts and qualified personal residence trusts
• Prepare estate, gift, fiduciary and non-profit tax returns
• Advise you on the possible use of various trusts structures; including charitable remainder trusts, grantor annuity trusts, personal residence trusts, family partnerships, credit shelter trusts, marital deduction trusts and revocable lifetime trusts.

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Accounting And Auditing Services

Audits

H B Belle & Associates Tax Service does not provide auditing services but can connect you with our partners.

Audits are usually performed because an outside third party requires an auditor’s opinion on the financial statements.  Audits are performed for the purpose of expressing an opinion about whether the financial statements are fairly presented and that they conform with generally accepted accounting principles or another financial reporting framework.

Audits are the most comprehensive of all the attest services.  Auditing procedures include testing accounting records and examining evidence supporting the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements.  Evidence is obtained through inquiries, analytical procedures, physical inspection, observation, and through independent confirmation. Additionally, audits require an understanding of the entity and its internal controls.

There are certain assurances that audits are not designed to provide. An audit does not provide assurance on or aim to identify deficiencies in internal control. The work performed as part of an audit does give us an understanding of how your company and financial reporting function.  This means we may be able to identify issues related to internal controls, processes, inefficiencies, cash flows problems as well as company and industry trends.  As a result, the work performed during an audit may allow us to provide you with general business advice based on the insights gained during the engagement.

Reviews

Reviews are usually performed to satisfy third parties that want to be assured that the financial statements are not materially misstated.  They provide a lesser degree of assurance to financial statement users than an audit. Also, unlike an audit, there is no expression of an opinion on the financial statements, testing of controls or financial data. Reviews essentially consist of inquiries of company personnel and analytical procedures applied to financial data. 

Compilations

Compilations provide the lowest level of assurance of the financial statements services.  They are often required by outside third parties as well as internally by companies.

In a compilation we assist management in presenting their financial information as financial statements in the proper form.  Compilations also require us to acquire an understanding of the client’s industry and to obtain specific knowledge about the client.  Additionally, we read the financial statements and ensure they are free from obvious material errors.  They provide no expression of an opinion on the financial statements.

Agreed Upon Procedures

Agreed upon procedures are performed when the parties involved concur that they want the accountant to perform a specific procedure or set of procedures.  They can be useful when you or a third party wants some comfort about a specific area such as inventory or cash, but do not need the assurance and related time and expense of a full audit or review. Agreed upon procedures can deal with a diverse variety of subject matter such as the quality of collateral or due diligence related to a business acquisition. In all cases, agreed upon procedures are solely the responsibility of the parties who specify them and they never provide an opinion on the subject matter or financial statements.

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Consulting Services

At H B Belle & Associates Tax Service, our business is to know and understand your financial situation. 

Through our partners, we offer the following consulting services:

Financial Processes

Every organization can benefit from being introspective, skeptical and analytical regarding their finances.  We work with organizations to develop the predictive capabilities necessary to adapt to rapid changes and outperform their peers.  Specifically, we can help you with:

• Driving growth from new markets and opportunities.
• Enhance cash management through working capital optimization and better capital allocation.
• Improve finance operations by focusing on operational effectiveness, financial analytics as well as budgeting and forecasting.
• Enable efficient regulatory compliance.
• Effectively manage risk by identifying sources and improvements to mitigate high risk areas.

Business Valuation

Business valuations enable you to accurately determine the value of a business and its components.  It is essential that you know what a business is worth whether you are buying, selling, involved in litigation or planning your estate.  Our highly trained and experienced professionals work with attorneys, other accountants and financial institutions to ensure you are represented fairly.  Our business valuation team is comprised of Certified Valuation Analysts (CVA), Accredited Senior Appraisers (ASA) and accountants Accredited in Business Valuation (ABV).  Additionally, they are experienced in testifying in both Federal and State courts.  Here is a complete list of business valuation services we provide:

Litigation

• Marital dissolution
• Partner or shareholder dissolution
• Economic damages or bankruptcy

Financial Reporting

• Purchase price allocation
• Asset impairment testing
• Intellectual property valuations

Business Planning

• Buy and sell agreements
• Purchases or sale of a business
• General business planning

Bankruptcy and Insolvency Services

Our partners provide financial advisory services to Chapter 13 and Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustees, debtors, creditors and estate fiduciaries. We can aid you in formal insolvency proceedings, out of court corporate wind-downs, reorganizations and liquidations.  Details of the various services our bankruptcy and insolvency group offers are detailed below:

Bankruptcy Trustees

• Facilitate electronic records retrieval
• Identify hidden assets
• Assist with asset sales
• Assist with document requests
• Perform claims, insolvency and fraudulent transfer analyses
• Provide expert testimony

Debtors

• Assist with the software set-up to segregate pre- and post-petition activity
• Bankruptcy preparation
• Prepare cash flows and budget to actual analysis
• Perform claims analyses
• Provide guidance to development of a viable reorganization plan

Creditors' Committees

• Assess the reasonableness of cash flows
• Analyze budgets to actuals
• Perform preference analyses
• Investigate insider transactions
• Search for fraudulent transfers and asset misappropriations
• Analyze solvency
• Prepare reports and provide expert testimony

Estate Fiduciaries

• Assist with the sale of hard assets
• Assist with negotiating private sales of intangibles
• Develop causes of action to recover assets
• Distribute estate assets to creditors on the basis of priority ranking

Forensic Accounting

Fraud is an ever present and growing problem for business organizations. It can go undetected for years and is often committed by “trusted” employees.  Fraud impacts nearly every organization regardless of size and the costs can be substantial.

Our partners are highly trained Certified Fraud Examiners (CFE’s) and accountants Certified in Financial Forensics (CFF’s). We believe the best way to deal with fraud is to prevent it.  Their approach goes beyond looking at the numbers to analyze and interpret them and understand the story they tell.   They assess and protect organizations from fraud through a rigorous step by step approach as follows:

• Evaluate your organization’s overall fraud risk.
• Identify possible fraud schemes with an eye toward industry specific criteria.
• Rate any recognized schemes and analyze risk tolerance.
• Develop policies, procedures and strategies to mitigate the fraud.
• Implement and test detection and prevention against future fraud.

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