H&R Block Tax Associate reviews

it starts with a group interview. There is a room with approximately 20 people who will answer two questions in turn. This is a most unprofessional approach to hiring. With less than 2 days notice you are required to attend an 11 session mandatory training program called Skills for Success. This program is nothing more than a promotion for their very high cost Refund Antiicipation Loans and other similar products. Following this class, you are assigned to your office. You are then required to post your commitment hours. These are hours that you are ready and willing to work. You are assigned a work schedule that changes on an almost daily basis. If you have committed to 35 hours/week you may end up with only 4 scheduled work hours, meanwhile keeping your commitment hours free as you might get a phone call asking you to come in. Preparers work on Tax Preparation case studies when the season starts. There is an answer sheet that is provided to check your work. These answer sheets are not always correct and can lead to confusion. Some of the senior preparers are quite good and others are minimally qualified to prepare returns that their skill level indicates they are qualified for. Clients are assign to preparers by request or skill level.. This allows very little opportunity for new preparers to obtain clients. After 7 weeks of you are either kept on as an employee with no hours or scheduled to work further.

Lack of training given to new hires. H&R Block teaches only the basics in tax theory, and you pretty much have to learn more difficult tax subjects on your own. Can be hard on new hires, when a customer comes in with a difficult return that they don't know how to do, leading to a dissatisfied customer, or worse (inaccurate completed return). To be fair, there are usually some tax pros with lots of years of experience in each office, but through lack of employee retention (since it's only a seasonal job) most tax pros have limited experience. Hours are pretty terrible, there's two short peak seasons (early February and April) where you can get full-time hours, but between those dates a first year hire can only expect 10 hours a week at the most. Also, the concept of doing personal returns at a retail shop like H&R Block has been dying a slow death for years now with the releases of powerful and intuitive personal tax software and e-filing. So every year, the company suffers more and more customer loss, leading to a lot of stress on management and office leaders since they can't meet their number goals. H&R Block can only grow through attrition, meaning the death of mom & pop tax shops and hopefully their main competitors like Liberty and Jackson Hewitt.