We went to this accountant last year based on all of the five star reviews but we had a bad experience and I feel obliged to write this review as a cautionary note to others. In our case, we paid Herman $700 to do our taxes last year (we were initially quoted $450 plus $25 per 1099 several times by his receptionist but in person he quoted us $50 per 1099..we had multiple 1099's). We were told to bring our past tax filings with us on our first meeting as well. Herman ended up telling us after our initial meeting that he believed our taxes for 2013 and 2012 were filed incorrectly. We paid him an additional $650 to refile our 2013 taxes because he said he could get us $7,000 back. He also said our 2012 taxes were filed incorrectly and he could refile that for us as well, which is when I started to get suspicious because, while we were not in love with our previous accountant, we did not think she was so grossly incompetent as to file our taxes incorrectly 2 years in a row.
I did some research on the IRS website and found a discrepancy in the rationale he was giving us for refiling for 2012. I e-mailed him with what I found and he ended up apologizing and saying that the 2012 filing was actually filed correctly.
After a few days, we got an e-mail with all the forms for review mentioning that while he still believed the 2013 filing was done incorrectly, we now stood to get only $759 back, not the original $7,000 he quoted us. Reading through the forms, we notice that there was also a clause at the bottom about the IRS potentially sending us a bill for interest charges, which he did not mention.
I e-mailed him back saying that there was a huge difference between $759 and the $7,000 he had initially quoted and that considering we would be paying him $650 to refile, we would only be getting $100 back. I also asked him about the interest clause we found. I told him we were only going to refile if he could absolutely guarantee that we would not lose any money on the refiling (because that just doesn't make sense). He replied saying that the interest was not included in his calculation of $759 and made no mention of a guarantee. What that meant for him is he was making $650 on the refile in addition to the $700 we were paying him to file for 2014. What that meant for us is we would likely either be getting $0 back or we would owe the IRS money. Had we not been vigilant and had the wherewithal to double-check his work as well as to do our own homework (needless to say that's not why we hired a tax professional), we would have lost around $1,300 in refiling fees for 2012 and 2013 in addition to the $700 we were paying him to file for last year. That's $2,000 down the drain.
By comparison, our previous accountant (who had many years of experience and also worked in Manhattan) was charging us $550 each year for the same amount of work. Herman did end up refunding us the $650 when we said we didn't want to refile for 2013 because it didn't make sense for us but it didn't ameliorate the feeling that we were being taken advantage of. Had we not had this negative experience last year, we would have hired an accountant again this year. Instead, we chose to file everything ourselves with tax software for small businesses (entering 1099's takes approximately one minute), which cost us only $60, was fairly straightforward, and came with excellent professional phone support, not to mention gave us a nice refund. read more
