I have been waiting for months to write this review. I held off until I got my tax return in the…read moreslight chance I needed them to get involved with the IRS. But this morning, after almost 7 months, I finally got my return. I will say that when I contacted Paul directly, he was apologetic about my service and refunded their fee. That is why they get one star. But aside from that this has been the most maddening tax season in almost 20 years of filing taxes.
I contacted PIM in early Feb because I am military, wife is self employed, and she also has a W-2 from another state for teaching. Just a bit too complicated for us to do ourselves. I read reviews and PIM seemed to be a great choice. Well after finally getting through (left a couple messages before getting a call back), they scheduled me for an appt 4 weeks later. I was annoyed it was going to take that long, but figured it would be done correctly so its fine. What they dont tell you is that is just a consult appointment. You spend a hour with your tax preparer and then "They add you to the bottom of the pile". So we are already this much into it, and just had to keep going since everywhere else was already swamped. Our preparer, Tara, was respectful, but seemed ill-informed. We had a nanny over the summer and we paid a services to file all our tax paperwork for us. So she just had to add it to the childcare expense. She said she wasn't familiar with how that works and she had to ask someone about it. She also seemed to be confused with some easy stuff like how to file out of state W-2 with residency in another state. We should have cut our losses, but we didn't. We were already too far into it.
Now started the first wait. Tara said it would be about 3 weeks. Nope. Almost 6 weeks later and no less than 10 ignored phone calls and multiple ignored emails we got our paperwork for review. Me, not a tax pro, took one look at it and noticed it was WAY off. Like, just simple childcare credit stuff was completely ignored. It was more than $5k less than expected. So I contacted Tara MULTIPLE times before getting a response and shared with her my concerns, and she said "Oh, I guess I can file your nanny expenses in your childcare". You guess? You guess?? I am paying a PROFESSIONAL to do our taxes and she has NO idea what the heck she is doing? And to make matters worse, in the response she said "I also noticed your state return didn't compute right, I have to spend some time figuring that out". So lets recap - not only did she MASSIVELY undercut our return, but she MASSIVELY over claimed our state return. And if I hadn't already been expecting a general number, I would have just said it looks fine and had her file it. Two weeks later, its filed.
If all that wasn't enough, I had no idea that who is listed first on the return could impact filing, but guess what, it does. For the first time in our marriage, my wife was listed first for some strange reason. I didn't even notice when I reviewed it, but yup, she was. So because that is a change in how our taxes have been filed for the last 15 years, the IRS froze our return and required identity verification. Which, if you aren't aware, is a complete NIGHTMARE that ended up taking us almost 15 weeks, multiple hours on the phone with the IRS, and multiple hours verifying line by line our previous years returns. And its so nice when the IRS tells you "just make sure you are consistent with primary tax payer in the future to avoid identity verification". Noted.
So NO. I do NOT recommend PIM. I may not have a recommendation for a Va Beach service, but I will always have recommendation on who to avoid. PIM. Avoid PIM.
