Executive Accounting Services Inc

Feb 2015

We were referred to Jim Stillwagen for our 2013 taxes (filed 2014). Being new to the area and recently married, we were hesitant to file our own Federal and State. We were charged $195 (not exactly cheap) for his services. Several issues: ** Minor point, but his office also doubles as his house and he's a smoker. Everything stank like cigarettes in there. Jim, be a professional and take the smoking outside, wouldja? I know it's your house and all, but you're working with clients in there. And my wife was pregant at the time. ** He missed a major deduction -- thousands of dollars in moving expenses -- that only got covered because WE brought it up. ** He was too lazy to itemize our deductions, saying that we probably wouldn't meet the standard amount. Wrong! We totally met it when filing our own taxes this year, and are getting almost double the refund he got for us. ** Jim took four weeks to get us our paperwork back to us so we could sign and mail it in. He said it would be about a week! I had to call and leave several messages before he followed up with me. He then mailed it instead of letting us know we could pick it up (he's a 20-minute drive away), further delaying our refund. ** Jim misfiled an important piece of information (a tax overpayment from a few years back, worth over $1000) that caused our entire return to get rejected and subsequently delayed for over two extra months. ** He cashed our $195 check then began sending bills and calling, claiming he'd not received our payment. We had to send him a copy of our cancelled check before he admitted he'd made a mistake. He said it was because the name on the check didn't match the name on our filing (my wife's pre-marriage name was still on her checkbook). This guy is an accoutant, yet he'd just drop a check into his own account without seeing what item on his books it matched? What if HE were audited? How would he explain this undocumented income? Jim was difficult to communicate with, did not return calls, and incompetent. We could have had our return in a month or so, but instead it took over three months. We missed paying some bills due to this delay, incurring interest charges on credit cards that we would have had the money to pay... had our return come in a timely fashion. We also voiced our grivances and said we believed a partial refund was due, and he never responded (or even apologized). Worst of all, his routine and lazy processes cost us a portion of our refund that we'll never get back. Do yourself a favor and file your own taxes using H&R Block's online self-filing service. $9.99 for both Federal and State, and they provide audit analysis AND support (if the IRS decides to audit you). It's not that hard. My wife did it in about 2 hours, even with our six-month-old distracting her the whole time. :)