Whether you are facing a government investigation or require one inside your own organization, the process is consequential, and the stakes are high. Steve Ungar has been on both sides of the table.

An audit letter looks like an accounting problem. It is not. It is the government examining your records with the power to assess, penalize, and, when an examiner believes something worse is hiding in the numbers, refer the file for criminal investigation. Most audits end with arithmetic. The ones that don’t end careers. Knowing which kind you are in, before the government tells you, is the entire game.

An Audit Is Never Just Arithmetic

Whether it is the IRS, the Oregon Department of Revenue, or another state agency, an examination is a fact-gathering process run by people trained to notice more than math errors. Every document you produce and every answer you give becomes part of a record you cannot take back. We manage that record from the first response: what to produce, how to answer, and where the boundaries of the inquiry actually are.

Both Sides of the Table

Steve Ungar has spent nearly four decades on investigative matters from both directions: defending individuals and organizations under government scrutiny, and running sensitive internal investigations when an organization needs answers about its own conduct. He knows how investigators build cases, what triggers a referral from a civil examination to a criminal one, and how to keep a matter on the civil side of that line, where it belongs.

When the Investigation Is Yours to Run

Sometimes the audit exposes a question the organization has to answer for itself: financial irregularities, employee misconduct, a whistleblower complaint. A credible internal investigation can protect the company, satisfy regulators, and resolve problems while they are still private. We conduct internal investigations with rigor and discretion: preserving documents, interviewing witnesses, and delivering findings you can act on and, when necessary, defend.

What We Do

  • IRS civil examinations, appeals, and penalty negotiations
  • Oregon Department of Revenue and state tax audits
  • Sensitive audits where criminal exposure may be hiding in the file
  • IRS criminal investigation defense, coordinated with our white collar practice
  • Grand jury subpoena response and witness preparation
  • Voluntary disclosure decisions and negotiations
  • Internal investigations, document preservation, and formal findings reports
  • Parallel civil and criminal investigation strategy

Who We Help

Individuals and families facing personal examinations. Business owners and executives. Licensed professionals whose licenses complicate everything. Healthcare providers, whose audits follow rules of their own. Companies that need an investigation run inside their own walls.

Before You Answer the Auditor

The instinct in an audit is to cooperate quickly and completely, and hope it goes away. Sometimes that is exactly right. Sometimes it is the costliest mistake you can make, and you cannot tell which from inside the file. Call before you respond. The earlier counsel enters an audit, the more options you have.