FBC Farm Business Consultants Inc Disappointed with their services - Use them at your own discretion! Barrie Ontario

I don't normally air my grievances online, but I don't want others to go through the same thing we did.

A sales representative from FBC Inc. came into our store and offered their services. You pay an annual 'membership fee' for their tax planning services. However, if you wish for them to take care of any bookkeeping it is an additional fee. We are a small business and we don't know any better. We don't want to mess around with bookkeeping - and will gladly pay for ease of mind and for it to be done correctly.

We met the accountant ('R') for our region, who took care of our paperwork. He later told us that someone else will be taking care of our paperwork ('J') as he had too much on his plate. It seemed to have gone downhill from there. The following are some of the events that has happened:

1. FBC almost failed to give us our prepared income tax returns. We submitted our paperwork several months early and a week before the annual income tax return - We still haven't received it. After numerous calls, they claim it was because they are missing a t4 which was included. If they were missing it - why had no one bother to call us and ask for it?
   
   
2. 'J' had quit and no one had bothered to let us know. We were sending him questions and trying to set up an appointment to have our HST returns done and no one would get back to us. We called head office several times and were told that someone will get back to us. No one ever did.
   
   
3. We get another accountant and he ends up quitting several months later. (makes us feel suspicious)
   
   
4. FBC provides each of their members a file folder to keep their paperwork in. One year they didn't send it to us and it took us 6 months of asking before someone sent one to us.
   
   
5. The last issue we had where we finally had enough was when 'B', our new accountant did our HST returns for the last quarter of 2012. In March, we noticed that our account marked filing as "Overdue". It took several weeks of heckling and 'B' only filed my husband's company. He claimed to have lost the files for my business and promised to redo them. As of May 2013, he has not showed up to pick up the files and my account still says overdue. We have a new accountant who did my return for me, only to find that FBC had did it wrong. Now we are nervous about all the other filings we have done. Were they done correctly?

We stuck with them for 2 years hoping that'll get better. We feel that we were lied to and were ripped off. It seemed to us that they were keeping us hostage by holding our files against us because we did not renew our membership. But after all those events, would you? I'm disappointed at the way we were treated and sadly we will never recommend FBC.