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'Tax Lady' Roni Deutch Steps Down From CA Bar

By Tanya Roth, Esq. on June 08, 2011 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

You’ve seen her ads on television. She calls herself the “Tax Lady.”

Well, you won’t be seeing Roni Deutch’s commercials in California anymore. Roni Deutch resigned from the California State Bar last month, reports the California Bar Journal.

While this is a Superior Court case and not an appellate case or a California Supreme Court case, it’s nevertheless relevant to this blog as it affects California practitioners in all courts.

According to the Calbar Journal, Deutch's resignation came on May 20, weeks after holding a news conference outside her North Highlands office, where she announced that she was broke and was planning on quitting the bar.

Her financial troubles were escalated last August, when Jerry Brown (as Attorney General) filed a $34 million lawsuit against the Tax Lady, claiming that she had swindled clients out of money through a "heartless scheme."

The allegations against Deutch are grave -- she is said to have cheated clients out of millions. She is also said to have destroyed millions of pages of documents in violation of earlier court orders, reports the Sacramento Bee.

According to Calbar Journal, the Attorney General's lawsuit alleged that Deutch took upfront payments and provided "little or no help" to her clients in lowering their tax bills. The Attorney General claims that while her sales agents say that she has a 99 percent rate of success with the IRS, her real rate of success was closer to 10 percent.

Deutch graduated from Western State University College of the Law in 1990 and got her LLM in Tax from McGeorge School of Law in 1993.

According to the Bee, Deutch's tax law practice was once bringing in $25 million per year.

Despite the action brought against her, Deutch continued to disregard the rules, reports the Bee.

Earlier this April, Deutch ticked off Sacramento Superior Court Judge Shelleyanne W.L. Chang when she tried to get around the Judge's orders. Lawyers for the state attorney general's office alleged that calls from Deutch's "Tax Lady" toll free number were being diverted to a call center and subsequently, to a business owned by her brother, as well as to other businesses owned by former associates of Deutch.

Some people just enjoy life in the fast lane -- even if the lane could be a one-way road to prison.

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