Empire Wealth Management

My experience with Empire Wealth Management and Mauro DeCillis mirrors the other reviewers’ here. In a nutshell, he’s a con artist who lies to his clients to extort money from them.
As a small business owner, I wanted to support another local business, so I went to Empire Wealth Management for my tax return preparation. At our first meeting, Mauro explained his retainer and hourly billing system. I was concerned about not knowing up front what it would cost me for his services, so he asked me what I was expecting to pay. I told him $ 2000 (the amount of his retainer) was at the very high end of what I thought was fair for the size of my business. He assured me that his $ 2000 retainer should cover everything and that there would be no surprises… so I agreed to engage his services. In mid February I signed his «Engagement Agreement» and paid his $ 2000 retainer. Fast forward to October, after an extension had been filed for my return, I finally receive an invoice in the amount of $ 9,800! What!!! That would mean he spent over 30 hours (at $ 325/​hr) to prepare a tax return. Any rational human being would agree that that is absolutely ridiculous. Oh, and he refused to file my return until I paid up.
I was furious and requested a meeting with him to go over his invoice. When I arrived at his office, he had 2 body builder types sitting at the front area. These guys were not there the first 2 times I visited his office and I found them extremely suspicious. It’s as if they were there to intimidate or scare me (and they did.) I tried to get my bill down to something reasonable but the best I could do was talk him down to $ 6200. Still an outrageous amount for a simple small business tax return, but I was trapped. It was either cough up or have to go to another accountant to start over and endure late fees and fines for not filing on time, or who knows what his scary looking goons had in mind if I left that office without paying.
To this day, I can’t believe I was stupid enough to fall into this guy’s trap. I should have listened to my gut during our first meeting and walked away. I can only hope that this review will help others avoid making the same mistake I did. Stay away from Empire Wealth Management.

Stay as far away from this company and Mauro DeCilis it’s head accountant as you can. The billing practices are bait and switch and you will be presented with an ridiculous invoice (which you will have to beg for) days before taxes are due and told that if you don’t pay he will not file. Ours was $ 9800! Extortion anyone? The accountant we hired the following tax year did the same work for $ 3500 and did not need to file an extension to do it.
He works on retainer which you will never see the balance of if you decide to terminate your relationship even though the contract you sign allows for a 30 day out clause. His is hourly is $ 325 and even though he will tell you he will pass on the lesser work to assistants at $ 60 an hour, he won’t. He will bill you for a 5 min phone call or to read a quick email at the full $ 325.
If you want to risk bankruptcy use Empire Wealth Management.
Stay away from accountants who work out of their basements.

We worked with Mauro for two years. Let me say first that Mauro is a very nice guy and it’s a pleasure to interact with him. He was very accommodating to our schedule and we often had calls with him and our financial advisor after hours to discuss our tax strategies for next year, which are probably more complicated than many other people have. And he’s quite good at quickly responding to emails and phone calls.
Still, we decided to part ways with him last year. Why? The quality of his work was quite low. By looking over our tax returns we spotted a mistake, which prompted us to carefully review them line by line. We found almost a dozen errors, some of them for thousands of dollars. The errors were of different kinds: Our income numbers were copied incorrectly from W2; donations were entered twice in two different lines in the form; we were surprised to see non-​qualified IRA distributions even though we did not touch our IRA’s; etc… My wife and I literally spent hours going over the forms and double-​checking everything. Mauro’s response to this was that 1) this is normal and clients always need to check the work of tax-​prep people and 2) his firm buys a very expensive and complicated tax program to fill these forms and «the program did it».
After all these problems, his firm billed us the full amount that they charge for tax prep. We decided not to fight it in court, but we are going to find a new company to do our taxes this year, one that knows the tax code a bit better and pays enough attention to numbers so that we don’t have to spend hours double-​checking their work for them.

Mauro De Cillo ripped me off for $ 1000. He took money from me up front and delivered no services whatsoever. When I asked for my money back, he refused and sent me a bogus invoice and then tried to get even more money from me. Avoid this service if you want to work with an ethical professional.