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If you’re lucky enough to have a smart accountant who you can trust and who is a whiz at crunching numbers, hold on to that person for dear life and never let them go!

Oh, and never question their expertise and try to tell them how to do their jobs…

That’s a terrible idea!

And this story proves my point in a HUGE way.

Check out what the boss at a tax office did when a client was out of line and thought he knew more than they did.

Look through ALL your bank statements to find deductibles? Okay!

“This is from my internship at a tax and administration office years ago.

The job was nice, but many of the customers were pretty demanding. My boss was the… Well… Boss of malicious compliance. She really had some great moments.

This sounds like fun!

One day a client came in who was unhappy with how his taxes had been done. He only got back €200 when he expected €400. He yelled at my boss to “Fix it, find those deductibles, just look through my bank statements and you’ll see them!”.

My boss doesn’t like being yelled at but likes the passive-aggressive approach, so she just said “okay, we’ll look through ALL your bank statements”.

Once the client was gone, she told the second in command (whose time was most valuable, clients get billed €120 an hour for her) to look through all the bank statements this customer has ever provided us.

This was gonna take a while…

He had been with us for 5 years and had a few different bank accounts and so did his wife, so it was quite a lot to go through.

After 4 hours the second in command was done, and had found an extra €50 in deductibles. She then redid the taxes, taking about half an hour, and told the boss she was done. Boss sent the client the bill of €540 (€120 times 4,5 hours) and his new tax form.

He sent back an email saying “thanks” and the following year he was much nicer.

For clarification: This was in the Netherlands.

Deductibles we can find in your bank statements are things like medical expenses exceeding a certain limit, certain costs for going to school, pumping fuel with the business account but forgetting to give us the bill to process, and some other things.

At the office, everyones time was worth a different amount depending on your knowledge, experience, and work speed.

Boss was €150+ an hour, second in command €120, the other permanent employee €90 because he couldn’t type fast, interns €20-60, with me being €65 because I picked up things very fast and years of gaming made me type very fast as well.

One other intern who knew literally every single thing about taxes was also €65, and he would’ve been worth even more if he worked faster.

Most clients give us the PDF files of their bank statements so no trees were harmed during the making of this malicious compliance.”

Take a look at what readers had to say about this.

This person weighed in.

Another Reddit user spoke up.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who is shocked to learn how little he has to do to keep his cushy remote job.

And this individual shared their thoughts.

Yeah, that was a bad move…

But, as the saying goes, if you mess around, you’re gonna find out!

This boss wasn’t about to put up with a rude customer’s nonsense!