H&R Block Held my Federal Hostage Among a Flurry of Lies and Blame-Shifting: Saint Louis Missouri

If ever there were a a perfect showcase for bureaucratic incompetence and abject failure at actual customer service, it would be the litany of lies and blame-shifting and exponentially-more-frustrating phone calls I have suffered at H&R Block’s hand.  Of course the corporate customer service line is the most flatly uninterested in fulfilling your promises or fixing your errors, because they’re an endless series of representatives basically hired to take an endless series of phone calls where they repeat pre-printed lines masquerading as help, as they are basically hired to do.  

In fact, the supervisor on the corporate line was so unable to budge from his prescribed script and insistence of the policy that he actually agreed with me that my tax “professional” Pamela Knobelach at the local office at Loughborough Commons was either incompetent or untrained - the woman I paid over 300 to my taxes, a decision that has become more and more an obvious mistake as this simple attempt to get H&R to simply stop holding hostage my federal refund and deposit it into my account, the option Pamela presented and I chose, has escalated into full-scale debacle.  His non-solution “service” was to tack on a form and five more business days to something that the local office already told me would happen today, because as we all know, appending additional wonton business days to an electronic process that should take seconds may be the only actual goal for most corprorate customer service representatives. 

But it’s even more jarring to get three different stories from three different people that work in the same small strip-mall office yet seem to have never met, giving the impression that they may not even work for the same company.  The first employee I spoke to this morning verified my info and cheerfully told me my refund was posting by direct deposit today and would definitely be there by 5pm.  I was reassured because it had not yet been instilled in me that simple statements by your employees should apparently be regarded as lies, so I was disappointed when this did not happen.  

So I called back at 7pm, where a decidedly less-friendly (and bordering on openly-hostile) employee directly contradicted not only her coworker I spoke to this morning, but doubled-down on telling me the information my tax professional printed in my tax refund is wrong - she insisted that in my situation, processing my refund was not even H&R Block’s job, that it would be sent directly from the IRS to my bank, for my bank to handle, and that the bank would also somehow know to send H&R Block the 500 dollars for the loan on my refund.  An infuriating failure to be sure, but one almost must marvel at her willingness to state wrong information so easily disproved by the documentation her office gave me.  Realizing the futility of speaking to this employee, I requested to speak to the initial person that handled my taxes when I went in.

As a human with the ingrained ability of pattern recognition, it probably goes without saying that this phone call was another futile hoop-jump only resulting in blame-shifting in this bureaucratic environment designed to enable each and every employee to deny responsibility for their failures once they’ve received their money.  (Extraneous but illuminating background fact - even she could not deny her responsibility that my refund was initially rejected by the IRS because she entered the EIN for one of my investment accounts inaccurately - perhaps I should have anticipated how badly my experience with H&R Block would get when their professional with decades of experience failed at data-keying and proof-reading, perhaps the two most basic expectations one could have in a person hired and paid hundreds of dollars to do one’s taxes.) 

Pamela told me I actually needed to talk to someone else - a different bank - not my bank, the bank I gave her my account information for when she told me my refund could be direct deposited and naturally assumed it would be in a timely manner, but the intermediary bank it gets sent to so they can get back their refund loan before sending actually sending it to my bank.  She states that this is all that she can do, and her tone indicates it’s all she is interested in doing.  Of course, having spent all day dealing with this and waiting for one person to give me consistent or helpful information, or even express a genuine desire to assist me, it’s too late tonight for me to even attempt making another call and so the ordeal stretches on.

Will you, the H&R Block social media team, care about one customer’s awful experience with your company, or do anything to remedy the situation?  I hope so, because even though not one interaction with any H&R Block employee so far has demonstrated an interest in doing their job, the social media team is often different.  I will never use H&R Block to touch a tax form of mine again, because it’s been too thoroughly impressed what a mistake that was.  But you have the power to blunt the rage and regret I feel for having paid so much money for your failures, and give me a reason to not spend so much more time posting my experience on every customer-service-related website on the internet - having worked in customer service myself, I know them all - and dissuading friends and family for the rest of my life from making the same mistake I did by doing their taxes with H&R Block.