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H&R Block Goofs on Its Own Taxes
omar.nyc writes "Red Herring reports tax preparation giant H&R Block, manufacturer of TaxCut and other tax software, goofed on its own taxes. The miscalculation on its state income taxes are liable by $32 million. This will reduce Block's fiscal year 2005 earnings by $0.02 per share and $0.02 per share in fiscal year 2004." From the article: "Besides the problems that Block had with its own tax prep needs, the company also experienced difficulties with the technology in its offices last month that hit its bottom line early in tax season. 'Technology problems across the H&R Block network in early January impacted our ability to serve clients in those crucial early weeks,' said Block Chairman Mark A. Ernst. He said the problems had been corrected, but they impacted the company's ability to serve 250,000 clients at that time of year."
According to H&R Block's website;
http://www.hrblock.com/
"Fast Money
Walk into an office with your taxes, and walk out with an Instant Money Refund Anticipation loan check. Up to $9,999 based on your refund amount. Money in your hands fast."
People, don't ever EVER get your tax refund this way. You may be in a financial jam or just impatient to get your money, but this is sure way to loose your money in a blink of an eye, and possibly the most stupidist thing you can ever do. The % you loose due to interest rate for loan in this case is highly unregulated and its easy to get scammed.
Here is a quick article on pending lawsuit against H&R Block in California, posted on MSNBC.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11373754/
Just wait 3 weeks and get your full refund (if you don't owe that is), or ready to get charged 500% on that refund.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I apologize for posting AC but as you read below you'll see why . . .
This is a classical corporate decision making screwup.
HRB has for the past number of years distributed its tax prep. software* for its offices via CDs. Naturally given the nature of tax prep. software there are numerous updates over the course of the tax season.
(You realize of course that lots of federal & state tax changes & forms come down through November & December, but even as of Jan 1st of any given year, neither the IRS nor the states have all their tax forms for that year finalized . . . so any tax software must of necessity go through a process of continual updating throughout the tax season. That's just all part of the fun.)
In past years, HRB office's major software updates were sent out via CD and minor updates sent via network but had to be manually downloaded and applied.
Of course HRB had various problems with this system over the years--batches of CDs that were bad, local offices that didn't apply updates as they were supposed to. Just the normal very predictable kind of stuff. Plus there is lots of ticky upgrading stuff for local support people to do--going around sticking upgrade CDs in servers at various offices, etc.
So last summer HRB hatched the idea of rolling out automated download software. From the user's point of view in a local HRB office, this is a black-box bit of software that sits on the machine, automatically pulls the latest update from the HRB central server, and automatically updates all the needed software--not only the tax prep software but all the other necessary stuff like time clock, scheduling, point-of-sale, whatever.
When I heard about this plan for automated updates through the grapevine last summer I just about choked. And of course immediately predicted disaster. As did everyone else who actually understood the situation.
The HRB software is big. On the order of a full CD's worth of stuff or more for a major update, of which there are maybe 3 or 4 a year.
Most company-owned offices in urban areas have always-on broadband connections. So you could see this scheme working there (with good properly tested software, which it turned out this software download "tuner" was not).
Any network connection, even always-on broadband connections, are by their very nature of variable quality. And remember we're talking here about thousands of offices here in every conceivable part of the country and even overseas.
So you can imagine the type of problems that might crop up, especially if the autodownload software didn't recover well from errors (which it didn't), give the end user any information about its operation or errors it had encountered (which it didn't), or give the end user any way to recover from errors (which it didn't).
But lots of offices, e.g. in rural areas or franchises, are on 56K or lower (even MUCH lower--think *remote* rural areas) dial up connections.
To download a major update via dialup takes something like three days. And that is assuming all goes perfectly, which of course it never does.
Meanwhile since it is "black box" to the end user (don't want those pesky end users messing around with the innerds of our software!) the local HRB people don't even realize it is stuck 2% through the download and don't have any way to get it unstuck even if they did realize.
Getting it un-stuck involves calling into headquarters tech support, working your way through a few layers of that, then waiting for somebody from headquarters to remote into your office machine to issue the supersecret command to make the tuner reset itself on the stuck channel.
Meanwhile this fantabulous new download software was never really put through end-to-end testing. Yes, somebody must have more or less tried it out in a test lab somewhere, but nobody actually sat & tried to spend 3 days downloading a major upgrade over dialup from Oskaloosa to find out what might happen under realistic networ