Since you came to this web page, you are apparently looking for more insight into my biases and work experiences. This large web page is in the early stages of what I hope will eventually become a biographical booklet for my children and grand-children and anyone else who might be interested. I've lived and worked during an interesting and turbulent period of time and eventually, I'd like to combine my own biographical history with a parallel of the history of the times. Until then, this mini-biography is an ongoing work in progress, which I periodically modify and add to.

Hopefully, it will provide you with some insight into whether I'm the type of tax accountant you would like to have as one of your financial advisors and/or whether you might like to subscribe to one or all of my research reports on :

• Global Asset Protection or
• Offshore Tax Strategies .

In 1962, I graduated from Wichita State University (Wichita, Kansas) with a degree in business administration and a major in accounting. I received a job offer from Deloitte, Haskins & Sells (one of the "big eight" international CPA firms), to work in their Kansas City, Missouri office. During the indoctrination session, I asked the Managing Partner how important it was to pass the CPA exams and get the designation. He informed me that in a company where all of the partners and most of the staff people are CPAs, "It's no big deal if you are a CPA, but it can be a very big deal if you aren't." I got the message and finished the exams within a year. In 1964, I received my certificate from the State of Kansas, where I still reside. (A lot of the people who work in Kansas City, Missouri live across the state line, in Kansas.) 
 
 

In 1996, I left the (then) "big eight" CPA firm where I was working, to be the chief accountant for a life insurance company and I was immediately given the duty to prepare the company tax returns. However, I soon learned that I was also expected to uncover legal ways to help the company to reduce their taxes. After a while, I discovered there isn't a lot that can legally be done to reduce a taxpayer's tax bill after the tax year is over. It's similar to the old cliché' about closing the barn door after the horses are gone. Finding ways to save taxes while preparing a tax return is far less effective than saving taxes by engaging in tax planning - what I like to call "pre-meditated tax savings". 

In 1972, I was promoted to the position of V.P./Controller of the insurance company and continued in that position for seven years. I also continued to be responsible for the hands-on preparation of the income tax return of the company and the charitable foundation returns for the family that owned this insurance company. As I became more familiar with the complex tax rules that apply to life insurance companies, I began to develop planning strategies to help the company to reduce their taxes.  

Meanwhile, like many corporate accountants, I was helping some small businesses with their accounting and taxes, as a sideline. One client was constantly nagging me to help him find new ways to reduce his taxes. After a while, that led me to start spending time reading tax literature for small businesses instead of just reading about the tax rules of big insurance companies. For a while, I would give my client clippings of things I found that could help him to save taxes. 
 
 

Soon after I started to work for the insurance company, I began to study the Life Office Management Association course of programs that is used by the insurance industry to educate home office employees. Because I was the only CPA in the company, I was soon drafted to teach the course on insurance accounting. Before long, I was teaching three of ten different courses. 

I don't recall how it started, but I found out that the new junior college in our county was looking for accounting teachers and I applied for an evening teaching job. After a couple of years, the head of the department asked if I had any training or background in personnel management. I replied that I was the head of a company task force to overhaul our company employee benefits system and that seemed to be enough. So I spent about three years teaching a course in personnel management instead of accounting. Frankly, it's a lot more interesting to the students - and to me. In any event, my nearly six years as a junior college instructor made it easy for me to later become a seminar speaker at various financial conferences. 
 
 

In 1975, I started a bi-monthly newsletter in my spare time to help small business owners to understand how they could legally reduce their taxes by engaging in tax planning. In late 1977, I sold my little newsletter to Kephart Communications, Inc. in Alexandria, Virginia. They changed the name to Tax Angles and they turned it into one of the largest consumer tax publications in the U.S. at that time. For more than seven years, my job as editor was to research and uncover more legal ways to help our subscribers to save taxes. However, for the first two years as editor of Tax Angles, I continued with my job as an insurance company V.P. 

My sale of the newsletter turned out to be a huge success for me - compared to anything else I had ever done. Instead of a flat sales price and a salary to continue as the editor, I received a generous royalty on the gross revenue from the subscriptions to the newsletter. Within a year, I was making far more from the royalties than from my job as the V.P. of a fairly substantial insurance company. I'd accomplished the  common dream of turning a part time venture into a profitable full-time income. 
 
 

By late 1978, I had created a list of more than 200 legal ways to save taxes, but I had also discovered that there was a problem of matching these tax avoidance options with different clients. It occurred to me that it would save time and be more consistent if that matching process could be done with a computer. So I hired some computer programmers to create a program that could be accessed on a time sharing system via a telecommunications terminal. The program was designed to permit the user (a tax advisor) to enter information about different clients so that the computer would then select the tax strategies that would be most  suitable for each client. 

It soon became apparent that I couldn't continue as the editor of a large tax newsletter, as the Controller of a large insurance company and still have time to develop a new business based on a software program. So in spite of the trepidations of my family, I quit my job with the insurance company and devoted my time to the computer business - apart from the time I needed to spend on the tax newsletter. 

I eventually discovered some fatal flaws in my thinking about the potential market for the computer program. It turned out that there were very few tax accountants at that time who had any kind of computer terminal for access to a time sharing system. I also found that most of them didn't seem to be very interested in finding ways to save time by helping their clients to save taxes. And, I'm now inclined to believe that most of my prospects were understandably hesitant to use a program that embodied someone else's judgment (mine) about which tax strategies were suitable for their clients. What I had was a very early and crude version of an "expert system" - a form of artificial intelligence. And I hadn't built in the logic to help the user to make the program an extension of the user's expertise and judgment. Instead, the user of the program was forced to rely on my professional judgment instead of his or her own. The "bottom line" is that my first software venture didn't get off the ground. 
 
 

I was the Editor of Tax Angles during what has come to be known as the "tax shelter era". Because I was writing about different kinds of tax shelters and doing quite a bit of public speaking on the subject, there were quite a few subscribers who wanted me to help them evaluate the tax aspects of different kinds of tax sheltered investment opportunities. After a while, I discovered a way to recompute the projected after tax rate of return for the life cycle of the investment - using the optimistic data provided by the syndicator in their offering memorandum. In most of the deals I looked at, the real rate of return after taxes wasn't enough to justify the risk. After doing this a few times, I developed a computer spreadsheet template to make the calculations more quickly. 

Most of the success of the tax newsletter and the demand for my services as a consultant for tax shelter investors was due to a growing public alarm over "bracket creep". Back then, the top tax rate was 70%. Meanwhile, the annual inflation rate was in double digits. People were finding that they were subjected to higher and higher tax rates purely because inflation was pushing them into higher tax brackets. Tax rates once intended only for the very rich were being imposed on people of relatively modest means. And, the fear that this would get worse was at a level close to the hysteria that occurs in a crowded theater when someone yells, "fire" at the top of their voice. 
 
 

As mentioned earlier, my idea for an expert system to help tax advisors to select tax saving strategies for their clients was a flop. But, while talking to the prospects, I received a number of suggestions that there was a need for a quick and easy program to do "what if?" calculations. I soon had a need for that myself in order to help my clients to understand which tax shelters were suitable for them and which were not so I developed another computer program that would "run the numbers" on a before and after basis. I designed it to be a quick and easy program that required a minimum of input data. Because of that design objective, I called it "Shortax". But, as I sold it to other tax accountants and financial planners, I soon found that they wanted it to have other features, like corporate tax computations and trust tax computations. As I added these features to the software, and added other features to make it more "user friendly", the program got bigger and bigger. Before long I called it SHORTAX+PLUS to show that it was more than a quick calculator. 

The program was designed to make comparisons of different tax alternatives for individuals, small corporations and trusts. The user could enter a set of estimated data, compute what the tax would be for the next five years and then revise the data to make another calculation. The program also allowed the user to save each calculation and to compute the difference between any two data sets. This made it possible to compute the after tax difference in using alternative tax strategies. 

The concept was well received and I was able to generate enough sales to encourage me to persist.

All of this software development co-incided with the early stages of the micro-computer industry. My first software program had been modified to work on a Radio Shack Model I and another desktop computer that didn't survive the competition. As the micro-computer technology developed, there were major changes in the computer equipment, operating systems and related software. Before long, we were making major revisions of my program every year. The industry was still going through the early stages of a shakedown in deciding which hardware and operating systems were going to become the dominant systems. That meant that software developers had to spend the money to create different versions of their programs to run on different platforms. In my case, I also had to cope with constantly changing tax laws. 

I soon learned that it's very difficult to teach a programmer the nuances of the tax laws. And, because of the constant need for revisions and the extreme cost of hiring people to do that, I started to learn how to do the various calculations using the BASIC programming language. In time, the programmers and I developed a system in which the data management components were a sort of shell into which I could insert my various tax calculations. 
 
 

As a pioneer in the development of tax planning software for micro computers, my biggest marketing job was trying to find other accountants and financial planners who had micro computers. So I came up with the idea of starting a newsletter about the use of computers for financial advisors. I called it the Financial Systems Report and it established me as a kind of industry "guru" on the use of computers in tax and financial planning. Although the newsletter did help me to get some prospects for my computer software, it also became a separate business and generated more public speaking assignments and writing assignments. However, I was being asked to explain computers to financial professionals instead of explaining taxes to the general public. For a few years, I was living and working in two worlds. One was the tax newsletter and the tax clients for whom I worked. The other was the computer industry and the writing and speaking engagements I received for sharing what I was learning about computers. 

After a couple of years, I discovered that as my subscribers made a selection of a specific kind of computer, they began to gravitate toward information that was specific to their system and they would drop my newsletter - which dealt with a wide range of different systems and software. I considered trying to expand the newsletter into different versions for different software/hardware platforms, but by then I was able to get lists of potential prospects for my software and didn't really need the newsletter any more to generate a list of prospects. So I let the computer newsletter expire by not renewing any subscriptions for a year. 

A few years after that, the constant updates that were required to keep up with the fast changes in the computer industry was consuming far more money than I was making. In addition, the 1986 tax law decimated the tax shelter industry and the economy was in a decline.  There was a huge drop in the level of interest for tax planning, so I decided to cut my losses and closed up the Shortax product in 1987. 
 
 

In 1981, President Reagan convinced the Congress to pass a tax law that reduced the top tax rate from 70% to 50% as a first step in his goal to reduce the tax rate to no more than 33%. At the same time, Paul Volker was Chairman of the Federal Reserve and he convinced the other members of the Federal Reserve Board that the way to combat inflation was to restrict the growth of the money supply. The two events produced an almost unprecedented and dramatic drop in the fear of bracket creep. However, the cutback in the growth of the money supply was causing higher rates of interest and a strong recession. 

Many businesses were going under, companies were laying people off and the people who had been worried about bracket creep were now worried about having an income. The circulation of our tax newsletter began to drop and most of our competitors were simply going out of business. I felt we could keep the newsletter going at a lower level of circulation by shifting the focus to professional tax advisors like accountants and financial planners. The publisher (not the same one I started with) was convinced that I just needed to put more "pizzazz" into the copy - ala USA today and Money Magazine. We eventually reached a point where we could only agree to disagree and he was the owner of the newsletter. I resigned in March of 1984. 

A few months later, another tax newsletter publisher asked me to become the editor of his tax newsletter, The Small Business Tax Saver . In addition, we agreed that he would publish a tax book that I would write. I had the book nearly done by about September, 1984 but then it became clear that the Congress was going to pass a major new tax law that would make a lot of the information in the book obsolete as soon as it was published. So I waited and we ended up getting the book on the market in January, 1995. The publisher was able to get it accepted as the book of the month by the MacMillan Book club, but his other marketing efforts were far less than we hoped for. The market for tax information had just dried up. People were still far more worried about making a living than about saving taxes. By the summer of 1985, the publisher shut down The Small Business Tax Saver and I was faced with looking for a job or of trying to launch an accounting practice without a lot of capital. 
 
 

I answered an ad for a position as a small business consultant and took the job, even though it was not a salaried position. My assignment was to generate some accounting clients and each of the various consultants in the group would refer business to each other. Less than a month after I started with that group, it was bought by a person who seemed to believe in 'dialin and smilin' - like the stockbrokers do. He insisted that I should make cold canvass phone calls to small businesses to see if they needed an accountant. I told him I could do that on my own and why should I give him 50% of the gross just for an office cubicle and a phone. 

Then I got an offer from an insurance agent I knew to launch a financial planning firm. He would do the selling and I would take care of the technical work and the office details. That sounded like a good deal to me and he seemed to be an effective sales person so I agreed. We spent about six months going through all kinds of red tape to get licenses and such. I had to get an insurance license and a broker's license during that time. Just about the time everything was in place, I found out that my partner had taken a job working as a sales trainer for an insurance agency. 

But, I had all the legal stuff that's needed to be a financial planner and I embarked on a process of calling on local insurance agencies to see if they could use a financial planner to work with their agents. One large agency made me an offer to give me an office and to endorse me to their insurance agents. I lasted about a year with that arrangement but the bottom line was that the insurance agents were far more interested in closing a sale than in doing financial planning. A technician like myself was just a fly in the ointment for the salesmen. 

Meanwhile I had been building a modest clientele of small businesses that needed help with taxes and accounting work. I eventually decided to give up on being a financial planner (aka salesman) and decided to focus on being a public accountant. 
 
 

In late 1986, President Reagan pushed through the second part of his program to cut the top tax rates from 50% to 33%. A major part of that tax package included some draconian laws to curtail what the Congress perceived as a "abusive tax shelters." If they had asked me, I could have told them that just cutting the top tax rate and cutting the rate of inflation would have been enough to eliminate the tax shelters that were being peddled purely as a way to save taxes. But they didn't ask me and if they had, I'm sure they wouldn't have believed me anyway. 

While I was working as the Editor of Tax Angles and doing a lot of consulting work, I had the cash flow to hire professional programmers to help me with the constant updates that were required to keep my tax planning software program up to date with the tax laws and with the constant changes in the micro computer industry. In order to save some money to update the program to include the changes that were introduced by the 1986 tax law, I decided to write the instructions and sample calculations with the Lotus 1-2-3 computer spreadsheet so that the new programmer could make the changes a lot faster and with fewer errors. I ended up with a very large and complex spreadsheet that virtually replicated the program that was written in the BASIC computer language. I made updates of the SHORTAX+PLUS program available to my customers and I also offered a copy of the spreadsheet as a separate program for those who preferred to use spreadsheets. 

In early 1987, a large bank in Kansas hired me to help them update a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet template that compared the after tax benefits of a lump sum pension distribution that is subject to the five or ten year averaging tax versus a distribution that is rolled over to an IRA. Our arrangement gave me the rights to market the program after it was developed. For the the next few years, that program grew and evolved into a complex set of Lotus worksheet templates that handled a wide range of retirement benefit tax planning. The market demand for this new software grew as fast as the demand for my SHORTAX+PLUS program was falling. 

I was also finding a market for other tax calculation spreadsheet templates. While doing some tax work for a couple who were planning on a divorce, I had developed a "what if" worksheet to compute the tax based on different divorce settlements. I was able to sell a few hundred of those to lawyers and individuals. I also developed a very large worksheet that I used to compare the tax costs for doing business as a proprietor, partner, sub-S owner or C corporation owner. That worksheet also enjoyed some success. In the next few years I developed dozens of other special purpose Lotus 1-2-3 worksheet templates but by late 1990, that market was drying up. It soon got the point where you could hardly give away a spreadsheet template - no matter how useful it might be. 
 
 

In 1988, I began to work closely with a group of financial planners (as the tax accountant for their clients) and in early 1989, they encouraged me to get back into the tax newsletter business. So I began another newsletter - called The Jacobs Report on Investment and Retirement Tax Strategies. I also focused my consulting work on tax planning for retirement and estate preservation because I was getting quite a bit of work helping people who were trying to decide what to do with their pension benefits. 

However, after a few years, we decided to shift the focus of the newsletter to the new field of asset protection. Although I had captured a couple of hundred subscribers for my newsletter, it was costing me a lot of money to build the circulation. As I analyzed the marketing problem with my associates, we concluded that there still wasn't a strong market for tax information. 
 
 

In 1991, I published a book (The Zero Tax Portfolio Manual ) that was an anthology of the newsletters I'd written on investment tax planning. Then I published an update in 1992. During 1993, I was following the developments of the tax proposals made by President Clinton and the Republicans. When Clifton's proposals became law in August, 1993, I was able to release a full size book analyzing how he had changed the tax laws. (I called it How To Protect Yourself From Clifton's New Taxes .) The research I did for that book was used to update my investment tax guide late in 1993. Early in 1994, I also published a small book on the tax aspects of pension distributions with information about the estate tax aspects of this subject. A substantial part of the pension distribution guide was based on what I had discovered by developing and using my pension analysis software. 

However, the market demand for income tax information seemed to be declining because there was so much information available in the mass media. Our local newspaper was giving everyone in town a free weekly tabloid about financial topics - with a lot of tax tips included. Money, Kiplinger's, Worth and a number of other mass market publications had taken away many of the prospects for a tax newsletter. 
 
 

Meanwhile, we had been watching the emergence of a new legal specialty to help people protect their assets from the growing litigation epidemic in the US. At first, the lawyers who provided this kind of help were looked down on as pandering to drug dealers and other crooks who wanted to hide their money in offshore trusts. But one law firm that specialized in this kind of service was very effective in cultivating publicity through articles in publications for business people and professionals who were concerned about losing their life's savings because of a single lawsuit. I was still doing some public speaking on ways to save income and estate taxes and I had a chance to get acquainted with some of the pioneers in the asset protection field at those seminars. 

Then, most of the February, 1993 issue of Trusts & Estates was devoted to the subject of asset protection planning. If you aren't familiar with this publication, the best word I can find to describe it is "venerable". It is the oldest, most conservative and widely read professional journal for bank trust officers and for lawyers in the estate and trust business. For my associates and myself, this publication had just given legitimacy to the once dubious practice of asset protection. I knew there weren't any newsletters devoted to this subject at the time, so we decided to jump in and be the first to publish a newsletter on this subject. In April, 1993, I changed the focus of my newsletter to the new subject of asset protection. The revised newsletter was called The Jacobs Report on Asset Protection Strategies.
 
 

Near mid-1994, a former client and professional programmer asked me it I would like him to help me develop an Internet web site to promote my newsletter and the books I had written. He "made me an offer I couldn't refuse" because he offered to create the web site for me on speculation - for a share of the profits generated from the web site. It took him about six months to get the first demo site up for me to review. During the time he was working on the web site, I had been doing a lot of reading about this emerging medium for distributing information and for hopefully being able to reach more potential subscribers for my newsletter. When he showed me the first design for a web site, I asked him what would motivate people to come back after they had been there once. What we had put on the Internet was basically a copy of the printed catalog I had been sending to people who inquired about my newsletter and some of the books I had written. 

We decided to make some extensive revisions to make the web site more interesting and I set out to create about 200 pages of financial information to put on the web site. We got the second web site up and available for public viewing about October of 1995. Then we waited and waited and waited some more. For the first nine months that the web site was up, we didn't get a single order for my newsletter or books. 

Why? I knew there was a market for my products because I was still selling books and subscriptions by mail. To find out, I began to spend a lot more time connected to the Internet looking for answers to the question. After a while, I concluded that while my second web site provided a lot of titillating information about a lot of different financial subjects, it was somewhat reminiscent of the commercial about "Where's the beef?" In addition, I felt it needed a lot of improvement in terms of the sales copy and it was more than a year old in terms of the design features. In addition, I felt it needed more in-depth information about asset protection and some of the subjects covered in my books. 

By this time, my programmer friend had become "burned out" on continuing to experiment with different content and design approaches, so I decided it was time for me to start learning how to create web pages myself. About that same time, a close friend approached me with an offer to develop a new web site together to provide information about offshore investments, asset protection and related offshore financial topics. The business purpose of the web site was to create an electronic magazine and data base that would be supported by advertising. 

Early in July, 1996, I embarked on an intensive self study process to learn how to develop my own web pages. I bought a copy of HotMetaL Pro 3.0 and began to convert a lot of the back issues of my newsletter into web pages. Part of the material was converted for use on my own web site for my newsletter and part of the material was converted into web pages for the joint venture with my friend. 

About early October, 1996, I put up the third set of web pages for my own publishing business. After a few weeks, I actually began to get a few subscriptions. One of the main additions to the revised web site was the use of tables and some color. I also introduced a restricted web site for my paid subscribers so that there would be some useful information not available to anyone other than a subscriber. 

Meanwhile, I had been focusing on selling my asset protection newsletter via email. And, I had agreed to take over the publishing of another email newsletter that had been started by an internet pioneer by the name of Arnold Cornez. (I think Arnie must have been one of the first lawyers to use the internet.) Anyway, his internet newsletter was generating enough legal work so that he wanted some help. I agreed to take care of the production part of the newsletter and he continued as the primary author. About the same time, another electronic publisher had established a very substantial web site for insurance agents and financial planners. He approached me about writing a tax newsletter that he would sell to his growing Internet prospect list and customers. I was now publishing three electronic newsletters, but my own web site was heavily focused on asset protection. 

In late 1997, I decided I needed to redo the web site again. My primary objective was to separate the information about each of the three newsletters into separate web sites that were part of a larger web site group. With the help of an internet consultant, I decided to adopt a frame set where the separate web sites for each newsletter would be accessible from a frame across the top of the page. Down the side of the page, another frame would be used to navigate within each web site. In order to get some media reviews of my web site, I was encouraged to introduce some graphics - which I had previously been avoiding because of the extra time it takes to load web pages with graphics. The fourth "edition" of the web site was finished in the fall of 1998 - about six months later than I had expected. 

I'm glad to say that after all that trial and error, my web site was finally starting to generate some significant subscriptions for one or all of my email newsletters and also for my services as a tax accountant. It's just a start, but at least it's encouraging me to think I'm heading in the right direction. After all, I hear tell that Amazon.com still isn't making a profit even though they have a huge amount of sales volume. I can honestly say that I'm making a small profit from my internet ventures - even though my sales volume is very small at this time. 

Now, my focus is on getting more traffic of the kind of people who have an interest in what I have to offer. 
 
 

As a writer and newsletter editor, it occurred to me that email offers a lot of advantages over the U.S. mail for anyone in the business of producing and selling information. About late July, 1996, I launched a free email discussion list about the subject of asset protection as a way to get prospects for my newsletter. It was called the Asset Protection Forum. 

Near that same time, I also introduced a free public discussion forum on offshore topics to promote the Offshore Journal. However, it took less than three months to realize that there was huge amount of overlap between the two groups so I merged them into one about mid-1997. I also switched from the "Listproc" mailing list system to the "Majordomo" list management system because of a change in my ISP service. 

 Over a period of about four years, the list grew to include nearly 1,000 members. 
 

"Back at the ranch", the U.S. government made some extensive changes in the tax laws applicable to offshore trusts and other offshore financial interests in late August, 1996.. My newsletter was devoted to more of the offshore methods of asset protection. For most of 1996, the majority of my tax consulting work and research was related to the offshore area. I was spending a lot more of my time learning about the U.S. tax rules for offshore trusts, foreign corporations and related subjects. Early in 1996, Arnold Cornez, JD, asked me to review a draft of his book, The Offshore Money Book. A by-product of that was that he asked me to be the Tax Editor for his email publication, OFFSHORE, an eJournal [tm]. During 1996, I was a speaker at a half dozen seminars where I was asked to talk about the tax obligations of U.S. persons with offshore investments or offshore trusts. 

Meanwhile, I became acquainted with Richard Duke, an international tax attorney, through his frequent contributions to the Asset Protection and Offshore Forum discussion list.  We began to exchange email memos about subjects of mutual interest (mostly international tax law) and found that we had a lot of mutual interests. One subject that we shared was an animosity toward the unscrupulous promoters who were selling U.S. persons various illegal schemes to evade taxes. While we both like to help our clients to save taxes, we hate to see people into being duped into some kind of illegal scheme. The problem was that even well informed U.S. tax professionals could be misled because of the complexity of the U.S. laws on international taxation. 

In January, 1999 we started to co-author a newsletter on Offshore Tax Strategies. So, gradually I've become more involved in international tax issues through my writing and speaking. In turn, that's resulted in getting more clients who are seeking tax help with offshore trusts or foreign corporations or foreign partnerships. 

When I had work to do for a client I would drop the publishing activity and then when the client work was done (or when I was waiting for additional information) I would resume work on the reports for my subscribers. 

In late September, 2002 Duke and I agreed to present another Offshore Tax Boot Camp seminar in early February, 2003. Organizing and promoting that seminar will take up a lot of my time this fall when I'm not working for a client with some kind of tax problem.

Vern Jacobs
 
 
 

Your suggestions for improving this web page are welcome.  Vernon K. Jacobs, Webauthor .