The Taxes

I just got off the phone from filing my first official complaint about anything ever.

Paul and I made an appointment at H&R Block last night. The woman we requested had over 30 years experience and looked like she'd be able to handle the complications of me being an independent contractor and the stuff from the trust.

When we got there, they told us that she didn't even work there anymore. The guy we ended up with was painfully incompetent. He seemed nice enough, which is probably why we didn't complain last night. We spent more time helping him find the right places to enter things than he spent entering things. Eventually he called his supervisor over, and while she was better, I still had to point various mistakes out multiple times to get her to fix them. Then, she preformed their much advertised "second look" in about 90 seconds. (Can it even count as a second look if she'd filled out half of the forms?)

Eventually we were done.

And then they told us we owed them $500.

The supervisor must have seen the shocked looks on our faces, so she offered us a $15 coupon. I'd like to mention here that they didn't warn us that our return was going to cost us almost more than our taxes until they pulled up the total. We were totally blindsided. I almost wanted to cry.

Still in shock, we paid them and went home.

Today, I called to complain. Their website doesn't have anything remotely like a feedback area, so I had to phone their customer service line, which also didn't have an option for feedback. I had to wait after the computer voice asked me where I wanted to make my appointment four times before I was put on hold to talk to someone. Then, when I said I'd like to file a complaint, they hung up on me. I tried again, and this time actually talked to someone and got a reference number to track my grievance.

I did actually use the phrase "I felt like we were serviced by two incompetents, then charged $500 for the privilege."

My biggest issue is that they didn't give us any indication of how expensive it would be. If they'd told us, we would have walked out right then and figured out the taxes ourselves, and I'd be fine with that. Watching them do it made me pretty confident that we could have done them since we practically WERE doing them.

Last night, I felt stupid and ashamed of myself about the whole thing. Today, I feel angry. I'm hoping that they follow through, call me back, and refund at least a portion of the money we paid them. But who knows what will happen.