jacob M.
Horrible Experience. Avoid if you care about your money.
I started working with Aaron a couple of years ago and it all started out great. I had just got out of the military at the time and started a couple of small businesses. Aaron was very responsive at the time which I really appreciated, but he never was proactive in getting me my deductions. I had to call him all the time and remind him that quarterly estimates were due, and had to remind him to add certain deductions. He never contacted me proactively reminding me about quarterly tax estimates which made me very anxious throughout these past couple of years when working with Aaron. I was paying him at the time 300$ monthly for bookkeeping, a couple hundred per quarter for tax estimations, 900$ a year for business return, and around 400-500 a year for personal return. For 300$ a month, and with such a basic account, no employees, no contractors, just me earning as a software company transitioned to a small individual freelancing business with some basic transactions in my books, I would have expected much better service in terms of his proactiveness. In 2022, he began to get worse with his responsiveness and sometimes would go multiple business days without responding to me, and during this time we had renegotiated my pricing down to a much lower rate of 30-40$ a month for the bookkeeping hence the simplicity of the account, to which he is the one who recommended this rate and seemed perfectly fine with it at the time. He still was not proactive with getting me deductions and was less responsive after this time period. Come early 2023, he has been almost entirely unreachable for me, and he neglected my 2022 tax returns and had to file an extension. After he filed my returns for 2022 in 2023, he also was supposed to get me a q1 tax estimation for 2023, and he called me telling me that I did not have to pay the IRS anything as we had "overpayed". I had a substantial amount of cash in my tax checking account at the time and I had asked him multiple times to double check that all of this cash in the bank was oversaved and that it was not owed and could be spent. He gave me a resounding "yes jacob". Turns out he decided not to actually reconcile my transactions and bank statements for q1 and just make an estimation based off the previous year q1, which has never been how we had done estimations. We always did them based on a rolling period per quarter. We actually should have payed the IRS quite a bit of money. I ended up spending some of that "extra cash" on a vehicle, and then when q2 hit, he sent me my q2 estimation, which included the amount that we hadnt paid from q1. At this time, I did not have the cash in my tax account to make the payment and had to resort to pulling money out of my emergency fund to make the payment. When he told me about the q2 estimation due to the irs and that I didnt have the cash in my tax account for it, I went and did some digging myself as I couldnt trust him anymore, and found out that the money that he was supposed to withdrawl from my checking account to pay the state of utah and the irs was not even deducted from my account! He admitted to pulling it from the wrong checking account. He then submitted the payment months late to both entities. Come to about a week ago, I get a letter from the state of utah in my mailbox with a late penalty and a notification that they would be reporting to my credit. I called Aaron and told him about it, and he said "oh its probably a late payment". Once again he never apologied, he just simply said that he would call them to which he did and ended up just paying it. I can't recommend him, he seemed promising at first, but has really caused me alot of financial problems. To this day he still blames me for everything and comes up with excuses, which is probably what he will do when he sees this review and tries to come up with a response to make my experience seem illegitimate. At the end, I asked him for some documents for my new cpa, and he wouldnt provide them until I threatened to file a complaint with the dopl. Attached pics for proof.