Tax Guard Forms Strategic Partnership with ProfitStars®

Tax Guard, Inc., a tax compliance monitoring service based outside of Denver, has formed a strategic partnership with ProfitStars^®, a division of Jack Henry & Associates Inc. (NASDAQ: JKHY) that provides solutions to improve the performance of financial institutions and diverse corporate entities.

ProfitStars will offer Tax Guard's due diligence and monitoring services as an added option for its BusinessManager^® clients. BusinessManager is a Web-based accounts receivable financing solution that can benefit from Tax Guard's due diligence and monitoring because of its ability to uncover hidden tax liabilities in real time. It enables commercial lenders to identify credit risk more accurately, which leads to better lending decisions and stronger loan portfolios.

“Being able to document and file information for individual BusinessManager deals will be a significant risk mitigation and efficiency tool for our clients,” says Terry Renoux, ProfitStars' Lending Group President. “Tax Guard's proprietary process of identifying and monitoring tax liabilities can strengthen lenders' due diligence to select and assist only the most creditworthy businesses.”

The information Tax Guard gleans is not accessible through traditional sources such as county court or state records and it shows, in real time, if a company has any tax delinquencies, such as missed filings or unpaid payroll or corporate taxes. This is what differentiates Tax Guard from tax lien search firms – the latter uses easily obtained public information that merely identifies tax liabilities against which the IRS has issued a lien or levy, a process that may take more than a year to reveal.

“It can take months or even years before anyone knows if a company has paid its quarterly taxes, which puts lenders at serious risk,” explains Hansen Rada, president and founder of Tax Guard. “If you're trying to determine credit worthiness, it's extremely valuable to know if a business has consistently paid its taxes on time.”

An October 2011 nationwide sampling conducted by Tax Guard found that among 5,568 businesses considered for, or receiving, asset-based loans, 70 percent had tax liabilities or missing tax returns. Of those, a staggering 94 percent had no liens filed against them, making them undetectable by UCC searches.

Rada says he came up with the idea after realizing how skewed lenders' due diligence was. “If a company misses a car payment it can be denied a loan,” he explained. “But if a company doesn't file or pay its business taxes on time, it can have no effect on the ability to get a loan because no one knows about it. It was clear that the market was missing a key indicator of measuring true credit risk.”

To learn more about Tax Guard, visit www.tax-guard.com, email info@tax-guard.com or call toll-free at 877-550-6325.

About Tax Guard

Tax Guard is the only tax compliance company in the U.S. that works with lenders to expose credit risk in real-time before it becomes public information. Using a proprietary, patent-pending process, Tax Guard provides due diligence and tax monitoring services to factors and other asset-based lenders across the United States. Established in 2009, it is privately held and headquartered in Denver, Colo. For more information, visit www.tax-guard.com, email info@tax-guard.com, or call 303.953.6325.

About ProfitStars

As a diverse, global division of Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.^® (NASDAQ: JKHY), ProfitStars combines JHA's solid technology background with the latest breakthroughs in four performance-boosting solution groups – Financial Performance, Imaging and Payments Processing, Information Security and Risk Management, and Retail Delivery. Explore the power of ProfitStars' enhanced performance at www.profitstars.com.