The upshot was that by the time we closed last June, we owed the federal government a lot of money and the state a little bit of money. We were informed by many people who know that we should get a lawyer or something to help us work with the IRS and the department of revenue to set up a payment plan with them. (We DO want to pay what we owe, we just want to pay a reasonable amount each month.)
So, we selected Quantum which is a company that specializes in cases like this. I checked them out on the BBB ahead of time and the BBB stated that the company had a normal amount of complaints for the volume of business they do and that all complaints had been handled properly.
Good, right?
Wel, not for us apparently. We used the last of our money ($3500) to enlist the aid of this company.
It is now a year later. We have faxed and mailed more paperwork to this company than I care to think about. Much of it repeats of the same damn paperwork over and over again. We know that they extended an offer and compromise to the State but the state laughed at it. Quantum called to tell us that they'd never dealt with a state so nasty as NC. We have done our best to stay in contact with both departments and have tried to handle everything through the company.
Well, two weeks ago we got a letter from the IRS demanding our presence. A tad unnerving. We go in, they look at everything, declare that we had no criminal intentions and just made bad choices, knocked down how much we owed to something A LOT less and have worked with us to set up a proper payment plan that we all are happy with. It was a wonderfully amicable situation considering how much we owed them.
It was at this point that the woman in charge of our case informed us that the only reason she contacted us personally was because Quantum will not return any of her phone calls and has not done so for months. She said that she was trying to handle everything through Quantum but nothing was getting done and nothing was getting answered.
She told us that Quantum has done nothing this entire time but make her (and the IRS) very irritated because it felt like we were trying to avoid them.
Yeah, the last thing we want to do is make the IRS mad.
It's at this point that the husband and I start contemplating calling Quantum to get some of our money back.
Two days later we get a letter from the Department of Revenue. They want to see us. We go up there and don't particularly enjoy our meeting at all. The funny thing about the difference between the state government and the federal government. You can owe the federal government a buttload of money, and they'll work with you and are actually interested in seeing you pay it off and still be able to live. You can owe the state a little bit of money and they'll treat you like shit, threaten you with jail time and try to set up a payment plan that you will never pay off. (Seriously. Penalties and interest are added every month it's not paid off, regardless of whether or not you have a payment plan.)
They informed us that the offer and compromise given to them by Quantum was $1 which is why they were angry. (Understandably so.) They also told us that Quantum has not returned any of their calls either and has not been working with them at all. And the only reason they contacted us personally was because they couldn't get Quantum to do anything. (It should be noted here that while the federal government has decided there was no criminal activity, the state of NC has decided that since we weren't in constant contact we ARE criminals and are threatening us with jail time. Yeah, great.)
Obviously, at this point we want all of our money back from Quantum. They have done nothing but make a bad situation even worse.
We have called them and have tried to get a refund, but the "person that handles the refunds" never returns our calls.
Anybody have any advice on what to do at this point? Because we could really use that money and I'll be damned if they're going to make $3000 off of sitting around on their ass and making things harder while we did all the work.