Before there was a bankruptcy, before there was a Fannie Mae termination, before six hundred contractors went unpaid, there was a betrayal. Amie Sparks was CEO of A2Z Field Services, and by her own account in seventeen years of clean audits with Fannie Mae, she ran a company worth acquiring. First Rate Field Services, run by Chad Rulo, was reportedly in that acquisition conversation. Rulo is also the President of NAMFS. Instead, Sparks walked A2Z into a deal with Steve Horne and Black Dome Services, and came out of it installed as Black Dome’s President. Rulo sued. The case, First Rate Field Services v. A2Z Field Services LLC et al., is docketed at 4:2025-cv-01316 in the Eastern District of Missouri, with a parallel state action in St. Louis County Circuit Court. Strip away the legal language and what is left is a company insider who appears to have cut her own deal with a different buyer while a competitor believed it had one in motion, and then took the corner office at the winning bidder’s company as the prize. That is the transaction that put A2Z in Steve Horne’s hands, and everything that has happened since traces back to it.
What Sparks got for that loyalty was a front-row seat to watching Horne run the same playbook he ran once before. Horne’s history includes Wingspan Portfolio Advisors, which collapsed into Chapter 7 liquidation in July 2015 with somewhere between one thousand and five thousand creditors left unpaid. He was allowed to do it again. According to Sparks’s own sworn declaration, filed in A2Z’s bankruptcy case, Black Dome loaded A2Z with merchant cash advance debt taken out in A2Z’s name while sending the proceeds straight to Black Dome. The MCA lenders collected through automatic daily and weekly withdrawals from A2Z’s operating accounts, and A2Z never saw the benefit of the money it was on the hook to repay. By February 17, 2026, those withdrawals had starved A2Z’s cash flow to the point that the company started missing payments to the inspectors and technicians doing the actual work in the field. This is Sparks’s own account, sworn under penalty of perjury, of what happened after she chose Black Dome over First Rate.
Fannie Mae noticed the damage before this publication could confirm it independently. In late March, following what Sparks describes as widespread industry discussion of vendor payment delays, Fannie Mae opened an operational audit of A2Z’s payment history. On April 3, Sparks says she moved to rescind the Black Dome transaction and personally contributed more than $400,000 to bring vendors current, an amount that should tell every unpaid contractor reading this exactly how much money was actually at stake and how far short even that sum fell. She told Fannie Mae the February and March failures were Black Dome’s doing and had been fixed and yet Sparks was the President at Black Dome. Fannie Mae gave that explanation two and a half months of consideration. On June 17, its representatives told A2Z they had lost confidence in the company’s financial stability. On June 25, they made the termination final, cutting off a relationship that had represented 63 percent of A2Z’s annual revenue since 2009.
Sparks sob song is no different than that of Shari Nott during the NFN Involuntary Bankruptcy still meandering through the federal New Jersey bankruptcy court — eight plus years later. Each of these women, feigning victimhood, are in reality financial predators wielding their damage against Labor.
Sit with that sequence. A servicer’s own audit caught harm to contractors in March. Fannie Mae had the data, the leverage, and the institutional obligation to act the moment it found delayed vendor payments. It waited until June to pull the contract, and by the time it did, the damage to hundreds of FSTs and inspectors was already done and unrecoverable. Fannie Mae’s audit protected Fannie Mae. It did nothing for the labor that had already eaten the loss months earlier, back when Rulo was already in federal court trying to warn the industry that something was rotten in this acquisition.
Two days after the termination, A2Z fired most of its workforce. One week after that, on July 2, A2Z’s own attorneys asked Judge Mina Nami Khorrami in the Southern District of Ohio to convert the case from Chapter 11 reorganization to Chapter 7 liquidation, telling the court there is no path forward. That is the language of surrender, filed in writing, in a case this publication has tracked since the original petition.
There is money on the table, and unpaid contractors need to pay attention to where it is. A2Z’s attorneys are asking the court to appoint a trustee specifically to chase two sets of claims: more than $600,000 in preferential transfers paid to MCA lenders in the ninety days before the petition, and more than $700,000 in fraudulent transfers to Black Dome itself, arising directly from the transaction Sparks chose over First Rate. That is over $1.3 million in potential recovery sitting in this filing, and every dollar of it traces back to the acquisition Foreclosurepedia warned the industry about before any of this became public. Whether it ever reaches a single unpaid contractor depends on how aggressively a trustee pursues it, and on how many creditors show up in that case to demand it.
The proprietary software A2Z built over twenty-five years, Compass 360 Enterprise and Field Compass, will now be marketed and sold to satisfy creditors ahead of the contractors whose completed work orders gave those platforms their value in the first place. That is what liquidation means in this industry. The asset gets a buyer. The labor gets a claims bar date and a place in line behind whoever holds security interests.
Every Field Service Technician and Inspector owed money by A2Z Field Services and Black Dome needs to file a proof of claim in Case 2:26-bk-52098 now, not after the trustee has already decided who gets paid first. NAMFS, for its part, has two of its own member companies in active federal litigation over exactly this transaction, with its own president, Chad Rulo, as the plaintiff, and has said nothing to its membership about what this collapse means for the hundreds of contractors caught in the middle. This publication will keep tracking the Chapter 7 trustee appointment, the Rulo litigation, and the disposition of every dollar A2Z’s own lawyers just told a federal judge is recoverable.
