We have been very disappointed with our experience with George Horrigan last year when completing…read moreour 2024 tax return and we would not recommend him to anyone. I know this is a long review, but I want to provide all the facts. In 2024 my family went through a lot of significant life changes: bought and sold a house, sold stock to help fund the downpayment of the new house, moved to a new state, went through a, had a new baby, etc. We have always used TurboTax for filing our tax returns. We assumed some of these life changes would impact our tax return and we weren't sure if TurboTax was handling everything correctly. Since we are not accountants and don't have any experience with accounting or tax law, we opted to hire a professional to handle everything for us and let us know how much we needed to pay in taxes for the year. In March 2025 George confirmed he'd be able to help us and would have our return completed by the April 15th deadline. April 13th he let us know our return was not complete and the deadline was May 1st (due to Hurricane Helene) but he would be filing for an extension to give himself more time. We had never filed for an extension before, but let him do so. He did not deliver our tax return and calc of our outstanding tax balance until May 21st. His cover letter on our return stated that we needed to make our check "payable to the United States Treasury and mail our Form 1040-V payment voucher on or before October 15th, 2025". We then made our payment in July, before the October 15th date as he instructed. In November we received notices from the IRS that we owed taxes and were being sent to collections. It took us several weeks to get in touch with George, and in the meantime we immediately paid the outstanding balance. We discovered that filing an extension is just for the paperwork portion of your tax return, and it doesn't delay when your payment is due. We had no idea this was the case and it directly contradicts what his cover letter had told us to do. Because we had not made our payment by May 1st, we accrued an additional ~$2,200 of penalties. Upon meeting with George, we pointed to his cover letter and explained that we did exactly as it instructed and made our payment before October 15th. He claims he told us the extension wasn't an extension of payment. We do not recall this and there is no documentation of it. If he had said this, we would have asked him how much we were writing the check for. His cover letter on our completed return specifically instructed us to make our payment by October 15th. He has taken no responsibility. He claims we are his only clients to have ever had this happen, and said that the cover letter is auto-generated by his software and so it wasn't his fault. If he had actually done what he had originally agreed to and completed our return by April 15th, none of this would have ever happened. An extension wouldn't have been needed, and these additional penalties never would have been incurred. I know that George will post a response to this review and try to discredit us. He has alluded to the fact that he thinks we're financially irresponsible, which is not true at all, and not how you should treat your clients. I don't think he should be shaming clients for not knowing tax laws, that's why we hired a professional. A few years back our financial advisor at the time told us to make a tax pre-payment to account for some stock we sold, and we did. George keeps referencing back to that tax return, saying that we should have known that we needed to do that again. We have told him several times that we accept full responsibility for not doing a pre-payment in 2024 and we paid that penalty without question. We requested reimbursement from him for the penalties and interest that were incurred between May 1st and July, which is when we made our final payment. We did not request any compensation related to the pre-payment penalty. We paid it and our outstanding balance within the timeframe (by October 15th) he provided to us. We now have learned this costly lesson and won't do business with him again. We wish we just used TurboTax and everything would have been submitted and paid by April 15th as we originally planned.

I had a review on google as well, but that appears to be taken down…read more Before choosing Mr. Horrigan for my tax services, I should have read the 1-star reviews and asked myself: Would I be happy if this happened to me? The short answer is no. After my experience, I went back and read those reviews, along with his replies, which, in hindsight, are full of gaslighting--blaming customers, insisting they lied, and using capitalized words for emphasis. I fully expect his response to my review to follow the same pattern. But I'll upload email communications to counter any false claims. I initially reached out to Mr. Horrigan based on the glowing 5-star reviews. Our first call was fine, and he provided a quote--roughly 2.5 times the cost of a DIY tax service. I was okay with this, expecting his expertise to save me money in the long run. On February 11th, he sent a checklist of documents. I submitted everything by the 16th and followed up to confirm they received my files. Silence until February 27th, when he finally acknowledged receipt--11 days for a simple confirmation email. Not great service. Then, another month and a half passed with no updates, despite my repeated inquiries. Finally, on April 13th, Mr. Horrigan emailed me--my tax return was complete, and he wanted a 15-minute meeting to go over it. Everything seemed standard until it came time to pay. He handed me a summary of forms and schedules, and the price was nearly double his original quote--five times the cost of a DIY service. I was stunned. I understand prices can change, but when I take my car for a service and the mechanic run into complications, they call and ask if you want to continue. I was never given that option.This is dishonest business practice at least, a five letter F word at most A realistic quote should have been communicated, given that he knew I had children and would need to file Schedule 8812, which apparently qualifies as an "extra form" with additional fees. To add insult to injury, I later ran a DIY proof-of-concept return, which took only 45 minutes. Not only did I overpay for his services--I paid more in taxes. I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND MR. HORRIGAN TO NEW CLIENTS DUE TO HIS INCOMPETENCE AND IMPROPER BUSINESS PRACTICES. I ALSO ENCOURAGE CURRENT CLIENTS TO REEVALUATE THEIR CHOICE FOR TAX SERVICES. *update #1, based on his unprofessional reply* So much to unpack from this unprofessional response. Firstly, restaurants have the courtesy and foresight to price each individual item and show their customers in a form of a menu what they will be paying so there are no surprises... unlike your practice. (Try another analogy, because the restaurant one didn't quite hit home) As you can see from the photos I have uploaded, I have nothing to hide. There were no follow-up emails explaining the additional work that would be needed. I would also like to know when we previously met "in-person" other than the 15 minutes to go over my taxes (Which he also states, therefore contradicting the multiple in-person meetings). I would encourage Mr. Horrigan to upload the email evidence where he states additional work is needed from the base rate. What's astonishing is that Mr. Horrigan talks to each of my points, EXCEPT the one we hired him for, to help us with our taxes. Mr. Horrigan I ask you, a CPA and published author of two books, How is it that by using an online tax service, where I imported all my tax forms without any modifications was able to have a lower tax bill ? Please do not make the same mistake I did, read DJ's 1 star review on google if you want a similar story