"How we Began"

In 1978, The Tax Man, Ken Oase, began preparing tax returns on the coffee table of his living room. In the late 1970s, he was one of four tax preparers compared in an article in the Tucson Citizen entitled “Nothing’s Certain Except Death, Not Even Taxes”. The article showed his savvy as a preparer. Ken copied the article, put contact information on the other side of the page, rolled it up, and put it on the doors around his neighborhood. His business grew from there. He turned the living room into his office, the kitchen counter became the waiting room and a bedroom became the back office. That bedroom stored the CPU (big box with a knob that said “In case of emergency, pull!”), a printer for the computer, a copy machine and a desk with a phone for his seasonal workers use. In 1990, Annette Stevens, Ken’s daughter, took over the business and changed its name to Oase-Stevens Corp. There was the normal parent/child friction and so in 1992, David took over the business. He decided it was time to move out of the house. He rented the former Taco Bell building across the street from Ken’s house and expanded the business to offer more than simple bookkeeping and tax preparation services.