SurePayroll SurePayroll, a Paychex Company Didn't process termination form, wouldn't refund the fees collected while account was still active Glenview Illinois

I used SurePayroll for small business online payroll for many years.

Because I was tiring of their fees (there are online payroll services that are half the cost now), I terminated their services on April 5, 2016.

I did everything properly. I called them to speak with their termination department, the lady was polite and helpful and emailed me the termination form and gave me a case number, and I signed it, scanned it to a PDF, and uploaded it to their website via the contact us form, exactly as instructed.

It was easy and straightforward, so I thought I was done.

The next month, while reviewing my bank statement, I noticed they had charged me again with the automatic minimum fee debit.

I had read about this exact thing happening with SurePayroll on Yelp, so I knew to look for it. Many people complained that the automatic charges just keep recurring, even after termination.

When I called in, they claim that they had indeed received my contact us form submission but that no termination form was attached to it.

I knew I had done everything right when filling out the contact us form. I've got over 20 years experience as a web programmer going back to the dot-com era--I know how to build web forms and of course know how to use them. I had definitely attached the termination form PDF.

But they claimed they had not gotten the attachment and refused to refund the money collected for the month that had passed.

The agent had the gall to claim that their site never has bugs and that their web team searches for bugs on the site every day. It doesn't take an expert to know this is a glib lie. Anybody who has ever used a computer or smartphone or website knows that bugs are a fact of life when it comes to computers. I'm a software engineer by trade, and it is a fact that bugs are unavoidable in any program with more than a few hundred lines of code. Modern websites have millions of lines of code (in all the frameworks and libraries they are built upon). Bugs must happen and there is no such thing as a bug-free website. If you don't believe me from your own personal experience, you can read any beginner's software engineering textbook and confirm it: the more lines of code, the more bugs are guaranteed to be in the code.

Anyway, her assertion was that I must've forgotten to attach the termination form PDF, but isn't it interesting that I can make human errors like forgetting to attach someting but her web team is so perfect they never make bugs? Perhaps this web team are new deities we should immediately begin to worship because they are perfectly infallible.

I stayed on the line and resubmitted the contact us form with the termination form PDF attached and stayed on the line to make sure the agent did receive it. I got verbal and email confirmation that it was received and that my termination is effective as of June 1, 2016.

I also got verbal confirmation that I would not be charged any more monthly fees, but we shall see whether this is true or not. I'll update this report if they do end up trying to charge me again, because then it is clear with absolutely no doubt that SurePayroll is either incompetent or dishonest or both.