Hersman Serles Almond PLLC

I’ve worked with a few people here to get advice for both my business and personal taxes. I’ve always had great experiences. They are great about educating me when I have no idea what I’m talking about and the costs for tax prep are pretty reasonable. Big fan of this firm and will be coming here for a long time.

While I believe the accountants at this firm are knowledgeable I wouldn’t advise anyone use them unless they have no other resources for the expertise they need (2 stars because of expertise, 1 star for value). If you do use them expect to pay top dollar. Unless you have no problem paying $ 220+ per hour for every email, download, conversation, etc — get your needs in writing and their costs delineated with detail (ie what physical output they will give you) and make sure their charges are in line with your expectations before you remit any personal info. I contacted them for 1 small, specific need relating to just one form. They were recommended to me by someone who provides good value for the scope of their work ($ 3000 for entire estate planning) so I made the mistake of not inquiring about costs. I actually had my $ 700 bill on my desk before I’d received anything other than a verbal overview of my exposure to the tax in question (no form, nothing in writing), a lengthy upsell to their other services and, of all things, a thank you note (I know, both of those last 2 things should have told me what was coming). They did kind of try to work with me to get me what I needed but in the end I didn’t get any details in writing for the form I contacted them about, received a tiny fraction of my needs, paid the bill, cut my losses and had to go elsewhere.

You might want to think about hiring this firm for your tax related issues, if you care about paying the right price for the job. It would be also a good idea to ask for a written estimate of the bill before letting them work for you.
I used their service for one issue, they did a reasonable job, so I sent them the next year’s tax return preparation with some international complications. Only thing I heard from them was they needed to do some research, before handing me a bill for several thousand dollars for a single year’s tax return. Perhaps it was my fault that I didn’t ask for a quote first but frankly I didn’t expect a bill for tax preparation could be more than a few hundred bucks. If they didn’t know how to handle certain things and had to research them, I’d expect either (1) they did it on their dime since they didn’t know how to do their job, or (2) at least they should have first asked me that they were about to spend thousands of dollars of my money to study up on the issue and if that was okay with me.
If you want to hire so-​so CPAs and pay them through your nose, go ahead and hire this firm. Otherwise, I’m sure there are much better and cost-​effective service firms you can retain somewhere else.
Another personal issue for me was, I never got the impression that they had any respect for me as a customer. They went from being merely polite to quite rude very quickly once I complained about the unexpectedly high charge. Obviously, money matters much more to them than building long term relationships with customers. I’m glad my business with them is done. Hopefully, I won’t have to deal with them again.