June 2023 by Priscilla Mann
Aptos Personalized Tax ServiceI was in dire need of immediate tax help and a few of you recommended this business. I understand and respect that your experience was different than ours and appreciate your attempts to help us.We met with Magdalene and explained our urgency to get our taxes caught up. Covid took a toll and we were behind, but now had an important deadline and they needed to be done as soon as possible, electronically. She said she could definitely help and took our papers. A few days later she requested more paperwork, my husband immediately went to the office to personally deliver it. That was a Friday, on Monday I got an email stating our taxes were done. Yay! That was fast and efficient! Right? I wrote a nice note about them on here.But no. What the email did not say is that we now needed to send end our signatures, nor did it include the signature pages. Not even the bill. All it said was they were done. To me, done meant filed, especially since we were SO CLEAR about the urgency.Then we realized they only did 2022, which isn’t even the most urgent since it’s not due until October. She completely blanked that we needed 2021 and possibly more. We rushed to get her the paperwork, which, btw, we had already shown to her, back to her. What followed were a lot of email with missing information, missing pages, unclear instructions, and general incompetence. Even after we gave her everything she needed, including signatures, she STILL failed to file the taxes in a timely manner. Meanwhile I have been checking the irs website every day for nearly two weeks, waiting for it to register. Very frustrating! The only reason I became aware that they were still not filed was because she emailed (not called) to say there were problems accessing documents due to their encryption software, at which point I thought, “oh my god, they’re still not filed!” I asked why they were still not filed, she said, “well, you’re not our only client.” And also insisted on knowing why I needed them done quickly, which is nobody’s business and intrusive. But I told her anyway, and the agency I needed it for. She dismissed it, “that doesn’t happen” when it was exactly what was happening. But it shouldn’t matter, in any case, we hired them to do a job within certain parameters and they majorly FAILED.If they could not meet our timeline, had too many other clients, or lacked the expertise to get the job done, they should have been upfront about it instead of creating such huge stress for us. It seems to me that either Magdalena did not listen to our needs or simply ignored them. Either way, completely unacceptable!Also, considering the urgency, it seems calling as well as emailing would have been the most effective way to get this job done right.Summary, unless you have an established relation with this company, avoid them. Do not use them. Unfortunately I did not listen to the Yelp review and believed the neighbors, but for us, one star is generous.
