Dear Accountant.....

[Deleted]

We hired you and pay you good money to figure out our personal taxes and DH's self employment taxe to save us the stress and anxiety of doing it ourselves.  We did not hire you to give us quarterly coronaries.  In 4Q12 you didn't account for the fact that we had already paid 3Q12 taxes and you sent us a tax bill for double what we had set aside. You figured out the mistake while talking with us in a state of panic (ok it was me) and fixed it.  We paid what we actually owed and then life went on.  No biggie, we know mistakes happen and you have a lot of clients.  Whatevs. 

Then 1Q13/2012 personal tax time rolls around and you make the same mistake again, except for this time you don't account for the past TWO quarterly payments and send us a combined fed/state tax bill for $5K.  Seriously dude, we do not have that kind of money sitting around.  You gave me a freaking coronary followed by a panic attack until we talked to you and discovered the mistake.....again.  So something in your files is wrong that means our previous payments don't get accounted for. Fix it.  We pay you too much money to have our returns screwed up two quarters in a row because your files are wrong.   I've seen your CV and know you are educated and experienced so please, fix your files and make it stop.  My heart can't take it again!

Sincerely,

Piddly Peon Tax Payer


Fortunately fixing the error means that while we still have to pay, we have to pay $500 less than what we were prepared to pay.  Thank you for small miracles!

[Deleted]

Ha! We've talked about this before but my accountant freaks us out on the regular. Our ag accountant who does our quarterly/yearly taxes and the farm management side used to do this monthly. One time he forgot to deduct the money we put in our HSA which increased our tax bill by a ton. Now that's he's been there awhile (he was new) it's been much better. I thought about switching for awhile, but he's a genuinely nice guy, there's a lot to remember and ag accountants are few and far between.

The girl in the same office who does are payroll I just want to smack. We don't pay over-time (no reason to, completely legal, we follow the rules)but every month she asks about over time pay. I'M the one reminding HER of the rules and SHE's the one getting paid. She's also screwed up how much taxes come out of each pay check like 2 of the last 3 months. I'm lucky our employees are either family/it's their second job so they don't care too much because it takes a bit to fix. I was doing our payroll with MIL but it just got to be too much, too complicated and I always felt like it was wrong. The actual ACCOUNTANT isn't doing much better lately..lol. I finally complained and it did improve, but yeah, it's a monthly heart attack around here too.

The ridiculous part is, this is a well regarded accounting firm. Like the best of the best. Somedays I'm not so sure of it.

The good news is, I've learned the IRS isn't all that evil. There's plenty of warning/enough time to fix stuff/they don't care as much as everyone thinks. As long as you fix it, they'll workw ith you.

[emoflamingo]

I think you need a new accountant. Sheesh.