Empire Wealth Management

We worked with Mauro for two years. Let me say first that Mauro is a very nice guy and it’s a pleasure to interact with him. He was very accommodating to our schedule and we often had calls with him and our financial advisor after hours to discuss our tax strategies for next year, which are probably more complicated than many other people have. And he’s quite good at quickly responding to emails and phone calls.

Still, we decided to part ways with him last year. Why? The quality of his work was quite low. By looking over our tax returns we spotted a mistake, which prompted us to carefully review them line by line. We found almost a dozen errors, some of them for thousands of dollars. The errors were of different kinds: Our income numbers were copied incorrectly from W2; donations were entered twice in two different lines in the form; we were surprised to see non-qualified IRA distributions even though we did not touch our IRA’s; etc… My wife and I literally spent hours going over the forms and double-checking everything. Mauro’s response to this was that 1) this is normal and clients always need to check the work of tax-prep people and 2) his firm buys a very expensive and complicated tax program to fill these forms and “the program did it”.

After all these problems, his firm billed us the full amount that they charge for tax prep. We decided not to fight it in court (who has time for that?), but we are going to find a new company to do our taxes this year, one that knows the tax code a bit better and pays enough attention to numbers so that we don’t have to spend hours double-checking their work for them.