She prospers with many happy returns.

Sales-tax consultant Wilma Ross made her first pitch standing in a phone booth on Highway 74 outside Charlotte. Traffic roared so loudly that partner Gerald Johnson had to hold the door shut so Ross could hear. "We had no clients. Nothing," she recalls. "I just begged, literally begged for an

When they got in the door, the magazine publisher asked how long they'd been in business. "About an hour and a half," she replied. End of interview. And for this Ross had left a comfortable career? In a government job?

She'd quit her tax-audit job with the N.C. Department of Revenue three days before. The Morganton native's office was moving from her hometown to Hickory, and she didn't want to drive there every day. Plus she and Johnson spent their days reviewing claims from refunders. "We thought, 'We know more about sales tax than they do. And they're making a heck of a lot more money than we are.'" So they started Johnson & Ross Inc. out of her home in 1991.

After a five-year spate of cold calling clients, she, Johnson - a pilot and part-time Christmas-tree farmer - and two other auditors rack up revenues of $1.3 million. They've culled overpayments for Lance, Lowe's, First Citizens Bank, SAS Institute and Belk's North Carolina stores. As business has grown, her house, an 1881 hunting lodge, has shrunk. "I've got five bedrooms, and we're in all five."

There are myriad permutations of sales-tax laws. Companies collect their own tax if an out-of-state vendor isn't registered in his state. Clerks often don't realize there's a 1% tax instead of 6% on parts for a plant. If a vendor collects the tax and doesn't know what a part is for, Ross says, "they're going to charge 6% to cover their butts." Software is tax-free if a supplier does a needs analysis or adapts it somehow. "Now do you see why I have a job?" she asks. The firm goes back three years and has found $600,000 two or three times, though it averages $75,000. It keeps 50%.

Ross, 37 and president, graduated from Appalachian State, double majoring in accounting and adult education, then taught accounting at Western Piedmont Community College for a year before joining the Revenue Department.

She competes with Big Six firms and a dozen or so sales-tax consultants in the state. She says Johnson & Ross is the largest independent firm in the state, but her main pitch is that her staffers are all former auditors.

So how does it feel to be wheedling money out of your former employer? "It's been sort of tricky. We're the revenue department's worst enemies, but we have a lot of friends over there."