Complaint Review: My Tax Guru

I went to Eric Yankwitt to get information about filing taxes. I am paid by a foreign employer and I wanted to start paying taxes in Florida on my income. He advised me to open a company and file as an LLC. He also told me he would charge me a specific amount per year of filing. He said my filing was very simple and it wouldn't take him much time.

I paid him 2 years in advance totaling $850. I went through the process of opening an LLC, spending hundreds of dollars on opening an account with Paychex and starting payroll. I am a sole proprietor so Paychex took taxes from my paycheck and paid the IRS. They also took a fee every month. Eric Yankwitt put me in contact with the Paychex salesman immediately and it seems that this is the only reason he told me to open a company. I can only assume that Eric Yankwitt gets a fee for every client he brings this Paychex salesman. This same salesman sold me a 401k plan which cost me hundreds of dollars in fees.

I asked Eric Yankwitt to ask the IRS for a delay in my filing because I thought I could pay later in the year. I had no idea that this only pertains to paperwork and not to the actual tax payment. I asked him about doing this for months. He finally assured me this was done and I found out a year later this was not done. I was charged over $3000 in late filing fees from the IRS the following year. 

He sent me 2 IRS forms to sign for my first year's taxes. These were supposed to be my filing papers. The 2 forms were wrong, one being a page from one type of form and the second being part of a second type of form. This would have been useless and the IRS would have returned it. Eric Yankwitt then wanted over $2000 from me as a balance for the work he had done. I refused telling him that I already paid him for the 2 years of filing. He then sent me a list of all the charges. I never agreed to any of them when I first came to him.

I went and found another local accountant and told him my story. He was shocked and told me to immediatley close my company. He said there's absolutely no reason for me to have a company, get payroll or anything like this to pay taxes as an indivdual. He said he would charge me $250 a year to file me personal income tax with no other charges.

When I confronted Eric Yankwitt he told me he wanted me to open a company to protect me from lawsuits. I don't have a storefront or a company in any capacity and my company could never be sued because I don't actaully have a physical company or work under this company name. I recognized that it's possible he wanted me to open a company so he can get a fee from the Paychex salesman.

I have since closed my company, cut all ties with Paychex (a huge headache in itself costing me hundreds of dollars from when I started working with them) and now work with an accountant who charged me a decent rate for a simple filing.

Eric Yankwitt is not to be trusted. He has no idea what he's doing (at least when it came to my case) and he gives bad advice, possibly due to the fact that he gets a payoff for directing people to Paychex. He lied constantly about me needing a company, about the fees I was supposed to be charged, about needing to have Paychex payroll and about not being able to contact me for months due to unbelievable reasons. 

I am the third person to complain on this site about Eric Yankwitt and I hope people will Google his name and find these complaints before losing thousands of dollars and having serious problems with the IRS.