I would absolutely advise against having Esther Eisenstein doing your taxes…read more
My mother used her for many years because her office was convenient to where she lived. Sadly, I can remember many times that Esther made a mistake on my mom's tax returns, so they needed to be redone. Unfortunately, my mom was much too sweet and loyal to look for a more competent CPA, and so she stayed with her until she died.
Beyond that, my brother and I were shocked to discover that he and I had very similar histories with her ourselves.
My brother used her one year to do his taxes, and she assured him she would get him a really good return. He was young and didn't make much money, and she made him feel comfortable that she would do right by him, but would never give him a price for her services. Well... she did get him a refund of over $400, and guess what! She took the entire thing as her fee. He could have just paid $50 for a general tax service to do his taxes, and gotten the rest of the much-needed money back for himself.
And she did the same exact thing to me. I was really struggling one year, trying to make ends meet by tutoring and selling things, and since it was the first year that I didn't have a W2, I wasn't sure how to file. She used the same approach with me that she did with my brother: She used the whole familiarity and family history thing to convince me that she would do right by me, but she refused to give me a fee. She would always just say "not much", so I (not unreasonably) assumed it would be maybe around $50.
Well, I made less than $20K that year, and was struggling just to eat, and she wound up charging me $250. That was pretty much everything I had.
Fast forward to years later: After our mom died, my brother and I had significant difficulty communicating with her. We would send detailed emails with bullet-pointed or numbered questions, and we'd get back a non-sensical sentence or two without any punctuation. We constantly had to try and interpret what she was trying to say or ask, because she doesn't appear to believe in punctuation or sentence structure. Then, when we wouldn't understand what she was asking for, she would get frustrated and blame us for not getting what she needs.
Another HUGE red light was when I asked her to send me a link to ShareFile or some other secure uploading service, because I was uncomfortable emailing tax documents, and she had no idea what I was talking about. All these years as a CPA, and she didn't know about secure links! She just expected us to email sensitive documents back and forth, and had no concept of how utterly dangerous that is, and how vulnerable it makes her clients to ID theft.
I would never recommend using her. Never. There are far too many CPAs and tax services in Los Angeles that are friendlier, literate, upfront about their fees, and not careless with their clients' taxes. I regret that she got as much money out of my family as she did over the years.