Three words to describe our Tax Help experience: Inaccurate, Late, Inconvenient.
My husband had uneventful tax preps done with Duff at this place for 8 years, and for the last 2, I joined him (neither times with Duff). At our "appointment" last month we waited over a half hour before we asked if the wait would be much longer. Once we did this, they found another employee, Heather, (not who we made the appointment with), to take pity on us and help us with our taxes. We got married this year and asked Heather if we would get more money back if we filed joint or separate. She hit a button in her tax software and advised us that if we filed separately we would get an extra $400 back. Based on Heather's advice, we filed separately. We paid Tax Help $125 to file mine, and $167 to file my husband's return, and left taking away almost half less than what the two of us normally got back individually before we got married, (which we thought was weird since we had built a home, had a lot loan, sold a house, sold a car, and got married in 2015). But they are the "tax experts," right?
A week later I got a voicemail from Tax Help's, Brenda, stating, "There was something that went wrong that went wrong on the transmission of it and all the numbers changed in our system, sooooo Heather needs you to bring your return back in so we can try to get this fixed." Just the kind of voicemail you want to get after you pay so much money for accuracy and convenience. I take my tax return back, wait for Heather again, and when I sit down with her she informs me that she actually needed BOTH my husband's tax return and mine back. What a hassle considering I had not brought his with since they didn't tell me something was also wrong with his! She offered me a pre-paid postage envelope to mail his back so we wouldn't have to drive all the way back there but my husband did not trust them at this point and opted to deliver his by hand a day later.
A week later I get ANOTHER call from Brenda and she tells me my husband and I need to come BACK IN to Tax Help AGAIN to sign our returns, and that now he is going to owe over $200 and he would need to pay that at that time. WHAT? Why does he suddenly owe more money, I ask Brenda. She cannot tell me, so I request a sit-down with, Duff, the tax guy my husband used to see there and whom he never had any known issues with. Brenda was condescending and snide during this call so I unfortunately stooped to her level and match her rotten attitude, she hangs up on me, I call her back even more disgusted than before (what a total mess), and confirm our new appointment. Ten minutes later, my husband gets a call from a new Tax Help person who is completely condescending and proceeds to LIE and say it was my idea for us to file separate. (So now, the numbers are not jumbled up in their system, as Brenda had told me, but the real reason is they screwed up by telling us to file separate and they need us to file joint?). After this person blames me twice my husband gets angry and tells her it was NEVER my idea to file separate, that we could care less how we file, and that we just wanted the most money for our tax return! Heather was the one who told us we would get more money if we filed separate and we just followed her advice. The conversation ends with NO APOLOGY and with this woman telling him she is sending our returns back to us and to take our taxes elsewhere to have them amended.
At this point, it's been over a week and we are still waiting for our old tax stubs to arrive at our house so we can take them somewhere else to have the mess Tax Help created for us cleaned up. We will NEVER return to Tax Help and strongly advise you avoid doing so too. read more
