Re-write this email in a friendly tone: Thank you, Carl. While I understand you take a balance sheet approach to tax preparation, you are working with companies that have not had an accurate balance sheet since the day after the companies were open. The balance sheets are wildly inaccurate and, for example, contain vehicle assets that are long sold (and backup for such doesn't exist), others which have never been properly depreciated, and inventory that would take a team of 10+ people weeks to properly count. All which pre-date my time. 

We very much want to clean up the balance sheets for both companies, but right now is not the time. We are busier than we have ever been, and we are extremely short staffed. Neither me, Pam, or Russ (p/t nights) have the bandwidth to dive in to researching and preparing the 5 pages of requests for verification and production you requested. As indicated, one or more of us would need to take a considerable amount of time (probably over a week) away from our daily duties to complete what you are asking, notwithstanding the limitations of LFM's 20-year-old system that won't generate the long form GL and inventory reports you are requesting — it just crashes (upgrades are planned for 2024). 

What you are asking for is essentially a mini-audit and we just don't have the staff or bandwidth for that right now. Me, John, and Pam are often manning the phones, physically present in our yard for operations, and firefighting to get simple tasks done like pay bills and process payroll. Today all three of us were answering phones, working the front desk, walking to the yard to handle customers, etc. 

Hopefully by beginning of 2024 we will have a bookkeeper, a dispatcher, and a parts manager in place to support us. We have interviews scheduled. 

Right now, we just need our taxes filed with the most reliable information available to us, in a manner that doesn't put a profound strain on our businesses, and we can tackle (the necessary) cleaning up our balance sheets before the end of 2024.

If this is not something you can do, I need to talk to John about one of us taking considerable time off to research and prepare what you are asking for or we need to look at brining in someone from the outside to complete this work which would be costly and in my opinion completely unnecessary right now. 

Personally, I wish I could serve as the company's full-time CFO and that everything you are asking for was at my fingertips — but that is just not the case. Me, John, and Pam are running every aspect of the company with no help. Many of our accounting messes pre-date all of us — even before John was involved in the running of the business. 

I feel that all of these requests and "balance sheet approach" are a deliberate attempt to put such a workload on me that I collapse under pressure because you don't like me because I disengaged with you, with John's permission before. I have tried my hardest to re-foster a relationship but I just keep getting hammered with what I believe are unnecessary requested. 

Please confirm if you 100% require the information you requested in order to prepare and file our taxes or if you can work with us to get through this challenging time. I will meet with John from thing tomorrow and see how he wants to handle depending on your response.