Topic: General Posts

U.S. Tax Recovery Partners (f/k/a The SALT Group) primarily provides sales tax reviews on a contingent fee basis.  It works with some employees and many independent consultants mainly east of the Mississippi.  Once its consultants are in your office searching for sales tax overpayments, the consultants make copies of your recent telecommunications, waste removal and utility bills for review by independent consulting firms and they share the contingent fees.

It sounds like you're interested only in the waste removal cost reductions.  They'll try to expand the scope of their work to include other areas so they can get a bigger fee.  While they may do a fine job in coming up with cost reductions, you have to know exactly how much it will cost you since they work on a contingency.  Since any savings are prospective, they will calculate the savings as the difference between what they come up with using current rates and what you are actually paid during the past year.  Their fee will be a percentage of the savings projected over the next few years. for example four years.  This may or may not be reasonable depending upon whether the waste removal company will maintain their fee for four years.  If not, you won't get a refund on the fee, so you will have overpaid.  

It is your responsibility to negotiate the fee percentage as well as the projection period.  Ask them to give you an example of how they calculate the fee and make sure you're comfortable with it.