Jerry Savage did my 2000 and 2001 taxes. I had several complaints, including a two-month delay in sending me my tax forms (which had a large refund due). The biggest problem I had was that I trade a lot of stocks, and so I have many "wash sales", which need to be manually corrected and listed. As a result, I was paying upwards of $2000 for tax prep.
As Jerry said to me, "The time consuming part of your tax return is recording the stock transactions and attempting to make sure that there are no wash sales...In your case, using more than one account, it does consume some time."
However, when I went over the returns myself, I soon found 78 unreported potential wash sales - each of which could be a violation of IRS regulations. When I complained about this, I was told that "We make every effort to identify the wash sales but to have spent another 40 or more hours on your return would have been foolish."
In other words: We charge you thousands of dollars because it takes time to look for wash sales. But it'd be foolish to spend dozens of hours looking for wash sales!
I filed a complaint with the BBB. Unfortunately, the BBB only records whether a complaint is "responded to", not whether it's resolved satisfactorily. Since WSD did respond to the complaint ("Nuh-uh!"), the case was closed.
Worse: I then received an e-mail from Jerry, complaining about my BBB complaint, asking if I would withdraw it, and stating:
"I will take what ever action is appropriate to defend this firm and I am warning you that I consider this a form of slander if this effects my reputation."
That was in 2003. Good thing we have yelp now. read more