Federal tax refund.
85% goes unclaimed.

Section 1396 of the Internal Revenue Code. A 20 percent credit on the first $15,000 of qualified wages paid to each employee who lives and works in a designated Federal Empowerment Zone (FEZ). Up to $3,000 per employee per year. 322 active FEZ tracts across 30 cities. Three-year retroactive lookback available.

Your browser fetches the FEZ polygon file from a public CDN, geocodes each address through the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder API, and runs the point-in-polygon test locally. The only data that ever reaches a VentoKredit server is a count of qualifying employees and the customer-defined pseudo-IDs that qualified. Real names, real IDs, and home addresses never leave your device.

A large global accounting firm under retainer. The firm operates a Federal Empowerment Zone calculation engine and authors a Should-level tax opinion (greater than 70 percent probability of sustainment) on each engagement. The opinion is what unlocks tax insurance and the tightest factoring discount, and what gives your auditors comfort under FIN 48 / ASC 740.

Yes. After our accounting partner substantiates the credit, you can optionally engage Omega Financial to advance the funds in days. Omega buys the receivable at a discount that depends on the strength of the tax opinion. With a Should-level opinion plus tax insurance, the discount can compress into the 3 to 6 percent range.

Optional tax insurance, brokered by Marsh or Aon, pays out 80 to 90 percent of the credit if the IRS ultimately disallows the position. Coverage runs seven years from policy inception and includes the credit itself, penalties, interest, and contest costs. The Should-level opinion is the underwriting input.

A tiered Engagement Fee at Order signing, scaled to your expected refund: $25,000 above $1M, $10,000 for $500K-$1M, $3,000 for $100K-$500K, and $95 below $100K. The Engagement Fee is a prepayment that gets credited against the Processing Fee, which is 25 percent of the certified gross FEZ credit plus 25 percent of any interest the IRS pays in connection with that credit. Total customer cost is the Processing Fee. Tax opinion authoring fee is billed separately by the accounting firm (approximately $20,000 typical for Should-level). Optional tax insurance and factoring discounts are paid by you directly to those providers.

We are §1396 specialists, not generalists, and we are built around the SMB tier where the boutiques charge enterprise rates and the mills do not specialize. Our retainer relationship with a large global accounting firm gives us top-tier substantiation at SMB economics. Our tooling cuts case-handling cost by an order of magnitude relative to the boutique benchmark. The dollar value of the stack to your business is typically $200,000+ on a $2 million credit relative to the unsubstantiated alternative.