ear-fung.us I’m a programmer. I’m also pro-grammar.

Tax Time Troubles

Here I am, 5 days away from tax time and I don't even know if I owe any taxes. I'm never having my taxes prepared by a 3rd party ever again.

I moved from Florida to North Carolina, bought a house, and was worried about issues resulting from the move. I'd never paid state income tax (Florida gets most state revenue from tourism-based businesses) so I figured I'd just have my taxes done and not have the stress associated with preparing them myself with TurboTax or something like it.

Big Mistake.

I met with the tax consultant in February and she told me all the documents that I was missing. I told her that I'd email her PDFs of the missing documents. I did that 5 days later. Then silence...

I finally called the business and asked the status of my return about 2 weeks ago. The consultant said that she'd never received my email. So I checked my Gmail sent box. There it was, dated Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 1:46 PM. I re-sent it and waited on the phone till she said she'd received the documents. That was Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 10:34 AM.

Yesterday I called and was met with an answering machine 3 times during normal business hours (I called both locations multiple times). So I left a message. I'll bet you can guess what happened: nobody called me back.

My primary reason for wanting my taxes prepared by someone else was to alleviate stress associated with April 15th. This situation has increased my stress levels beyond what they were last year because I don't have my tax documents in hand; they are at the CPA's house and I have no clue as to the status of my return.

Today I went to the office and was met with a locked door. I knocked and someone came and unlocked it. I talked to the secretary and She told me that the CPA had all the documents at home. Since when do you not work at work during working hours?

She said she'd check on the status and let me know tomorrow and I said, "No. I need to know today so that I can make other arrangements if they're not complete."

"Ok, I'll try and find out and I'll give you a call later today."

Satisfactory, but I'm still not pleased.

The major error on the part of this business was a simple failure to communicate with me, their customer. Now I'm going to be asking for a rate reduction because of the stress they've introduced into my life when the original intention of using them was to keep that stress from me. A little "we're working on them" or "we'll have them for you to sign by April X" would have been sufficient for me to stop freaking out.

I'm certainly competent and capable of doing my taxes myself. I'll not be using this business again. I'll be doing my taxes myself next year.