What we charge, and why it is set there

Every review that finds nothing is paid for entirely by us, and those are a real proportion of the work — not an unlucky exception. The reviews that do find something have to carry them, which is what a contingency share is actually pricing.

On top of that sit the costs that exist whether or not there is a recovery: the rating manuals and tariff filings the analysis depends on, the time to prepare correction filings in the form each carrier or bureau requires, and the months of following them until money moves. A refund claim is not filed and forgotten; it is chased.

A fee taken only from money that has already landed in your account is the one structure in which none of that risk sits with you. It is also the structure that keeps our incentive honest: we are paid for finding recoverable money, not for producing a long report.

The share is not the same everywhere because the work is not. A sales and use tax recovery is largely documentary: the overpayment is evidenced by invoices you already hold, the statutory lookback period is written into the tax code, and the refund claim follows a published procedure. A workers’ compensation premium review is the opposite kind of problem — classification and experience rating across several policy years, where a correction has to be argued through the rating bureau’s own process and then followed for months until the money actually moves. The lower rate sits on the first kind of work and the higher rate on the second, and nothing in between is rounded to a half.