Summary: We lost $10,000+ in refund because of Duan's repeated mistakes in our filing.
Details: Duan is very personable and I appreciated her giving us confidence in filing initially. Our case was a 2013 amendment that I wanted to file in 2014. So this was well within the time range of filing.
(1) When she sent us the first set of prepared amendment forms, there were SO MANY mistakes, ranging from getting my husband's and my names and DOB incorrectly to transferring our income information poorly into the forms. The documents we had sent her were meticulously curated with an unmistakable naming convention. Yet, we sent so so many redlines back. She finally got the basic data right in the 3rd attempt.
(2) We had to file by mail (didn't give us the reason, just told us that's what the IRS told her), so all future correspondence from IRS to us was by snail mail. We had not heard back from the IRS for a long time, but when I requested Duan for help from her/ her team, there was none. No guidance on why this could be (if someone is an experienced accountant, I imagine they'd know to postulate), except for giving me the 1-800 number that I had already googled and called several times.
(3) When we heard back from the IRS later, they rejected our returns as the numbers were filed incorrectly. Duan sent me an email.apologizing for the mistakes, and sent another set of forms to refile. We're already in mid-2015 now. It was wrong again. The IRS told us in 2016 that the exact same.mistakes were made in the 2nd filing. There was no check, not verification. The local.IRS office where we went to check about repeated rejections said they would not accept a return or inform us of a rejection if a revised filing had the same mistake as the first one.
(4) I got an impolite and useless email back from Duan when I informed.her about this.
(5) We filed a 3rd attempt at an amendment in 2017 with an awesome preparer because we wanted to have nothing more do with Duan anymore. The new person filed our amended return - we got our state refund back!! But the federal refund, amounting to $10,000+ was rejected because it was too late.
Duan's service fees are not cheap. She charges us well over a $1,000 in bills, and then screen our refund of $10,000+. So that's a total loos upwards of $11,000. read more