My H & R Block Experience
I think H & R Block Sucks and here is why.
I’m usually so busy with work that I don’t get a lot of time to vent my ample rage on this blog. But today I’ve come across a cluster fuck of incompetence so outrageous that I am required to take time out and share it for the good of humanity.
Today H & R Block moves to the top of the top of the Grumpy Nerd list of Ire. They are officially the most incompetent business that I have delt with ever.
So this year I drew the fucking short straw and I was the lucky one that had to get all of the business tax info together for the CPA. I hate this tax shit. Getting this crap together for the CPA is like pushing rusted pins covered in Tabasco sauce into my eyeballs. I can’t stand it. So as a result I put it off. I put it off so long it’s too late for us to send the employee and contractor tax info out of town to get 1099-MISC and W-2 forms printed. Well Grumpy Nerd why don’t you just laser print them yourself? Well because you can’t. You have to send the IRS and the SSA special OCR forms or they fine you $50 for each form that can’t be read. So you have to get a tax prep person to create these special OCR (optical character recognition) forms for you.
Since I had to get this crap done quick I had to take the W-2 and 1099 filing part of our taxes somewhere local and to get them done quick. I stupidly picked H & R Block Premium for no better reason than they are open Saturday. What a horrible fucking mistake. Out of our 8 employee and contractor tax filings H & R Block made mistakes on 4 of them.
There are plenty of areas of the tax code that can be interpreted more than one way. Lots of accounting stuff that takes a really skilled hand to do right. I’m not talking about that. What H & R Block had to two was literally copy information from the printed page that I gave them to the IRS OCR forms. No tax knowledge. No math. They just had to copy what I gave them and transpose it to the correct OCR forms. I even told them which forms and printed the information in 12 point font.
It’s too bad that these forms contain sensitive information or I would post them up here for the world to see. Here is a list of the mistakes that H & R Block Premium made filling out some simple employer tax forms;
Employee #1 – W2 Form
- Social security number in the wrong box
- Filed to the wrong year 2006 rather than 2008
Employee #2 – W2 Form
- Social Security number in the wrong box
- Filed to the wrong year 2006 rather than 2008
- Wrong street address
Employee #3 – W2 Form
- Missing social security number
Contractor #1 – 1099-MISC Form
- Misspelled name
For our tax filing H & R Block screwed up the W2s for three of our four employees. They also made mistakes on one of our four contractor 1099-MISC filings. I speculate that the error rate was lower on the 1099 filings because they require so little information compared to the W2 forms.
This disaster of a tax screw up was performed at an H& R Block Premium branch. This is their high end joint for high income earners and business clients. If this is what goes on at their premium branch what is the experience at their regular joe six pack branches? Is it rusis monkeys throwing feces at tax forms?