Chapter 01
Where I started
I was born in California, and I've been in the Redlands area since 1979.
My mom worked at the VA hospital for more than thirty years. She also worked as a janitor, and my first job, at twelve, was cleaning AT&T buildings with her. My first real job was at the Long John Silver's in Redlands.
My dad, George Samaniego, was a combat medic. I became a medic. My son Andrew went to the U.S. Naval Academy, and my daughter Bella is at the Coast Guard Academy. Four generations of this family have served in the military. I'm somewhere in the middle.
Chapter 02
The medic
I served as a U.S. Army medic. When I got out, I went into civilian emergency medical services and worked as an EMT in the Inland Empire — fourteen years as a medic in total. I went through paramedic training, but I was never officially a paramedic, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I left the ambulance for a new job a few months before September 11, 2001.
What stayed with me from those years is a way of thinking. You don't fix everything at once. You find out what's really wrong, you stop the bleeding, you get the patient stable, and then you get them out. Years later that became the way I work with people in trouble with the IRS.
Chapter 03
The mortgage years
After the ambulance I went into the mortgage and real estate business. I wrote home loans, I sold real estate, and a lot of those years went to helping people use mortgage financing to deal with debt they couldn't get out from under any other way. Tax debt was often part of it. Long before I ever held a license to talk to the IRS, I was already sitting across the table from people who owed them.
Some of that time I was still carrying my own unfiled returns. I was helping other people restructure their lives while mine had a drawer nobody opened.
It was a different kind of triage. Same instinct: figure out what's really going on, then find the way out.
Chapter 04
The years I didn't file
Eight years. No returns. It didn't start as a decision — it started as a delay, and delays compound.
The debt grew. The mail grew. And the longer it went, the harder it was to look at. Anyone who has been there knows the specific weight of an unopened envelope.
Chapter 05
Facing it
Eventually I opened the drawer. Then I did the unglamorous work: reconstructing years, filing returns, negotiating, paying, and rebuilding a financial life from the bottom.
Chapter 06
Ernie
By the time I finally dealt with it, I had eight years of unfiled returns and six figures of debt between the IRS and the State of California. I went to see Ernie Mattison, a former IRS agent who had become an Enrolled Agent.
I walked into his office expecting judgment. A lecture about responsibility, at minimum. Instead he looked me in the eye and said, "Carlos, you're a good person who made a bad decision. And I'm going to fix this."
Then he did. No speech. No payment-plan pitch. He took the whole mess apart and worked it until it was done.
I watched how he did it. I started asking questions. In 2017 I became an Enrolled Agent so I could do for other people what Ernie did for me. His approach is the DNA of my practice.
Ernie's gone now. His photo sits on my desk.
Chapter 07
Becoming an Enrolled Agent
I started preparing taxes in 2012. I never planned on it. Ernie was the reason.
In August 2017 I became an Enrolled Agent, and that same month I started representing taxpayers to resolve tax debt. Later I earned the NTPI Fellow designation. An Enrolled Agent is licensed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury with unlimited rights to represent taxpayers before the IRS. The NTPI Fellow designation comes from completing the National Association of Enrolled Agents' National Tax Practice Institute, which is built around representation and tax controversy — the collections side of the IRS I'd already seen from the wrong end.
Chapter 08
Building Tax Debt Consultants
I founded Tax Debt Consultants LLC in 2017, the same year I became an Enrolled Agent. It grew out of the tax preparation business I'd started in 2012, but the LLC was built for one thing: representing taxpayers to resolve tax debt. That has been the work ever since. IRS and California Franchise Tax Board cases, unfiled returns, levies, liens, installment agreements, offers in compromise. The office is in Redlands, the area I've called home since 1979, and the practice works with people across California and the country.
The company has its own home at TaxDebtConsultant.com. This site is about the rest of the story.
Chapter 09
Liz & family
Liz. The kids. The grandkids. A service-academy parent and a Blue & Gold Officer.
Chapter 10
Bruno
Bruno came from a kill shelter. What started as rescuing a German Shepherd became another lesson in loyalty, responsibility, companionship, and second chances.
Chapter 11
The creative years
Writing. Books. Comics. A podcast. Video. A camera that goes where I go, and a sketchbook I'm still learning to use.
The Tax Debt Detective and The Tax Underworld came out of the same instinct: the real story of this work is stranger and more human than the forms suggest.
Chapter 12
What I'm building now
A body of work. Articles, books, photographs, teaching, and a record of the people and places worth remembering.
Mill Creek Media is the publishing and media company I created to house the stories, publications and original projects I'm building outside the tax practice — the books, the newsletters, The Tax Underworld, the video and the rest of it. Visit it at millcreekmediallc.com.
RedlandsNow came out of the same instinct, pointed at home. Redlands has been part of my life since 1979. There are interesting people, businesses, places and stories all around us that deserve to be noticed, so I started writing them down. Read it at redlandsnow.com.
Chapter 13
What I want to leave behind
Something my grandchildren can read. Not a résumé — a record. What I saw, what I got wrong, what I learned, and who was with me.