Straight talk: my CPA keeps delaying and is not responding

[Michael Plaks]

We accountants are regularly approached by investors who are unhappy with their current CPAs being too slow to finish the work, too difficult to get hold of, too unreliable, too something else... 

So I decided to open this can of worms which is sure to hit a nerve with many on both sides. Go ahead, chime in! I'll start with a copy of an email I sent to one recent prospect:

"...Cannot comment on your CPA relationship not knowing the other side of the story, and I'm not really interested in it, to tell you the truth. So here're some general comments. 

There're too few of us experienced REI accountants out there, compared to the demand for our services. New ones join the club regularly, but it takes time to get good at this. I know it from the extreme difficulty of hiring competent staff for my firm and a similar experience of my peers. Among the established ones, and I hope that yours is in this group, we have more prospects than we can handle. Some of us stop taking work when full, and others continue to take work creating unmanageable overload.

I've been in both of these situations, so it's first hand experience. If you lose control of your workload and get yourself buried, things get out of hand. Also, if you're dealing with a solo practitioner without staff, there's a constant struggle allocating time between technical work and customer service. 

Possibly the most important factor is the structure of your engagement. What kind of communication are you talking about? Asking for an update on the completion date for your tax return? Or asking for tax advice on your next deal? Is it built into your engagement? In what form? Do you have regular meetings? Are you supposed to have an ongoing access to your CPA in between these sessions? Via phone or via text or via email? 

In other words, what you describe could be either a service failure or a miscommunication about the expected relationship or a combination of both. Whether your business relationship could be better with a different CPA is the same question as asking about a better personal relationship with a different life partner. Things are usually very rosy when they start. Just ask Johnny Depp.

And one other thought. The last 2-3 years have been hellish in our tax business. The avalanche of new government programs, new tax laws and rules, new reporting requirements, government (lack of) processing and responding, ever-changing technology including adapting to all-remote work - all of that creates an enormous strain on our already thinly spread resources, often resulting in longer delays and lapses in service. Some of us manage it better than others."

OK, BP tribe, what's been your experience? Btw, here's a related post on CPA charges from a few months back: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

[Aaron Zimmerman]

I can echo a lot of what’s been said here on a variety of levels. Working as a CPA firm that feels very short staffed and has too much for the staff, it can be challenging to get back to all the requests in a timely fashion. I think there has been a widespread burnout from this years busy season and the cumulative amount of changes over the last 5 years. This can make many tasks such as a simple question from a client feel like a chore. 
That being said, we do understand our duty to the clients and typically get back within one or two business days with a response. Poor service is unacceptable but I also echo the above comments as well.