June 2022 by Jonathan G.
Worst tax filing experience ever! First, the only reason my mom and I came here to begin with, was because one of the workers, Judy, assured us over the phone that she could straighten out our botched 2018 tax papers. (We had been told elsewhere that until this issue was resolved, we would not be able to file our 2019 and 2020 taxes.) When we got there, she changed gears and said trying to re-file those papers was a bad idea, and to just file the 2019 and 2020 taxes while leaving the 2018 ones as they were. When we got to her office, it had piles of papers stuffed onto shelves and hapazardly spread all over the desk, without any sort of filing system. While we were sitting in said office, she was very casually throwing away some of the paper documents that we had been keeping with the tax paperwork, saying, "Oh, you don't need this" or "We can get rid of that," without bothering to check with us first. As it was, she was going to throw out our W-2's from a previous job! (Luckily, my mom asked for those back.) Then, she spilled a large cup of water all over her desk, onto our papers (and other people's). These are NOT the kind of documents you want getting water damage! Highly unprofessional. After a length of time, she told us she'd keep the papers, work on them there and get back to us. This seemed strange, since all the tax preparers my mom has worked with before, had her sitting right alongside them while they worked. Unfortunately, what didn't help was that a previous employer was initially unwilling to hand over my mom's W-2 for 2019, delaying the filing of those taxes. After several phone calls to that employer's upper management, they finally sent her the W-2 and we got a copy over to Judy on December 12th, 2021. As of January 20th, our taxes STILL weren't finished! We decided we had waited long enough, and drove to AIM to ask for our papers back. When we told the receptionist how long it was taking, she herself said they should've been done by then. We ended up having to Google Judy's home address to try to contact her there. She wasn't at home--had to call her cell. She was very unhappy we had driven there (How dare these two working class people show up in her million-dollar community!), and told us she wouldn't be available until 7PM that night. We said we would wait until then, and she reluctantly agreed to meet us at a gas station to give us our paperwork. We got to the meeting place, Judy arrives, hands my mom the papers in a single folder, and walks back to her car. We opened it up--it was a complete mess. Documents from all three years were jumbled together and the cardboard folders that we had been using to keep them separate were missing. It took my mom over an hour to sort them all out. Worse, three pages from other people's tax forms ended up with OURS! If you come here, do NOT let Judy Kerkhoff anywhere near your important papers!
