When you need professional services, asking friends or family for a referral is a great way to find someone good.

But what happens if the person your mother recommends for doing taxes ends up messing them up and almost costing you thousands?

That is what happened to this young man, but he ended up getting his revenge on the accountant and her whole company.

Let’s take a look.

A tax accountant intentionally mishandled my return and after I left a bad review, they harassed my family. but I think I got the last laugh

So, this story is a few years old and some of the details may be in the wrong order.

But a few years back i was filing my taxes and discussing them with my mom.

Filing them for that year would be more complicated than usual because I had enrolled in ACA aka Obamacare because my current job didn’t offer health insurance benefits.

And i had bought a boat and needed to file a tax form for that as well which i didn’t know much about.

Always good to have a recommendation.

My mom insisted that i use her tax accountant or whatever her position was to file my taxes.

We’ll refer to this woman as Marcy.

Marcy had been doing her and my stepdad’s taxes for them and their business for 8 years and they had a friendly relationship with her outside of work as well.

I had almost all the forms worked out by myself and knew generally what to expect in my return, but i was told she was cheap and thought it would be good to have someone file them and rest assured that nothing got screwed up.

I got all my paperwork together and emailed it to my mom so she could send it to Marcy.

This included my income tax paperwork, all the ACA tax info for the 1095-A, and the sales receipt for my boat.

That is weird.

I’m not sure why my mom didn’t put me in contact with Marcy directly but it was probably because she wanted to maintain a professional relationship with this person.

She didn’t want me and my informal millennial ways to damage her image or something like that.

Can she even file without him signing?

Well a few days later i get a call from my mom saying that Marcy prepped and filed my return and gave me an estimate of what id be getting back.

It was short $2500 of what my estimate came out to, and the figure she gave me was short by the exact amount i calculated I’d get back for my health insurance.

For Obamacare, you’re allotted a certain amount of credit off your monthly health insurance payments which you can apply directly to the payments or get back a lump sum on your return, which is what i do.

I was due back about $2500.

Well i figured Marcy must have only done my income taxes and neglected to do the paperwork for my insurance.

That is pretty expensive for simple taxes.

Her “cheap” fee for doing this was $500 by the way, which was more than half the amount i was due back according to her.

So, this all got me thinking and i figured she’s probably some old baby boomer who only does taxes for old baby boomers who “trust the experts” and don’t ask questions.

She had probably never had to do a 1095-A before because she mostly deals with wealthy old people with private policies.

And she probably assumed i was just some dumb kid who had no idea what to expect on my return, so rather than learn how to file the 1095-A which would have required 15 minutes of effort, she filed my return without it and hoped I wouldn’t notice the lack of $2500.

Well i was right on the money.

I called my mom and told her the estimate was wrong, and at first she so blindly trusted this accountant that she refused to believe me and just said “well that’s what Marcy said” so then i had her look at a 1095-A and enter the figures in herself and she began to see that i was right.

Now she lies on top of messing it up?

She asked Marcy in an email about it and the accountant made up some BS about how i wasn’t eligible for a return on my insurance but my mom persisted and showed her the form and figures herself.

This was met with a period of silence from the accountant and after a few days delay, she admits that she didn’t know how and would file an amended return.

I was furious at this point because it would mean i would have to wait an extra 3-6 months to get $2500 of my money and if i weren’t smart enough to know better id just be out $2500.

This person was prepared to just rob some young and not particularly well off young person of thousands of dollars because she didn’t want to learn how to do her job.

i just wanted to file the return myself at this point but my mom insisted Marcy do the job she was paid to do which i couldn’t argue with.

Well it got done and with no apology or offer of refund.

But i wasn’t done yet.

I had come to the conclusion that Marcy and her company were just another outdated business that preys on old people with money who are too trusting and don’t know any better.

I told my mom “if she could screw up my relatively basic return so fantastically due to negligence, who knows what she might have screwed up on yours and your businesses’.

Wow, she must be terrible at her job.

For once she actually took my advice and she went to another firm who looked over years of paperwork and found that she was owed $8000.

She took her business to them and no longer has any professional relationship with Marcy.

Well, this entire time i was waiting to leave a nasty review for Marcy and the company she works for.

I figured now would be a good time since they no longer do business with my mom.

Her company had recently merged and rebranded itself into a new company which was some kind of accounting and tax law firm and they had only two reviews on their google and yelp pages which were obviously by staff or people related to the staff.

I wrote an absolute masterpiece of a nasty review that was a summary of everything I’ve said so far and also mentioned that i probably have legal grounds to sue for malpractice and posted the review on every site i could find.

Anyone who read it could tell it was legit and I posted that knowing it would hurt their fledgling business.

Well i wasn’t the only one who knew this, because someone brought my review to the attention of the company CEO.

And my review listed Marcy’s true name on it so the CEO went through the company email database and found out who I and my mom were and confirmed my story to be true based on the email interactions.

He was furious and contacted my mom with an apology and asked for my phone number which she gave him.

Unfortunately my mom was very upset by this too because she and Marcy had mutual friends and this would cause drama.

He is owed much more than an apology.

Well, the CEO demanded that Marcy call me and apologize but i was refusing to answer the phone because I had nothing to say to her and where was my apology before I blasted her with a review?

She obviously wasn’t sorry.

At least not yet.

After two weeks of her calling two times a day, the CEO starts calling me too.

They had been spamming my mom with phone calls too and she was mortified and had called me and was almost in tears because the drama was so upsetting to her.

Finally I pickup one day when the CEO calls.

He’s all polite and says how regrettable Marcy’s negligence is and apologizes and I just come out and say “listen i know why you’re calling and why you’ve been calling for weeks. you want me to take the review down”

he basically confirms this yet doesn’t offer me anything other than his sincere apology.

I told him it was beyond what an apology could fix because what Marcy was prepared to do to me wasn’t just a little oopsie.

What if i was someone struggling to get by and that $2500 was the difference between ending up on the streets.

I told him the review would stand so long as she remained employed by the company and told him to have a nice day.

Well, rather than fire her, they continued to browbeat my mom with harassing phone calls to the point where she was so upset that i finally deleted the review.

I had made my point and I’m sure Marcy’s reputation with her company was in the toilet.

So, my next course of action was to get my friends and coworkers together to review bomb the company with 1star reviews to the point where I’m sure anyone looking online for someone to do their taxes will look elsewhere.

And i know without a doubt that they know where all those reviews came from but there’s nothing they can do now.

Anyway I’m proud of this story because it just shows you what one guy with a laptop can do when a multi-million dollar company tries to step on you.

If she can’t do her job well, she shouldn’t be working there!

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say.

Yeah, calling multiple times a day is unacceptable.

This is a really good idea.

She should have been fired.

They absolutely should have.

This ‘accountant’ should never file anyone’s taxes again.

It sounds like she’s well on her way.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.