Read before you risk your family finances
Please read before you put your family or personal finances at serious risk.
The scary stories you hear about tax authority in Germany, we went through them all, thanks to Steuerspezialisten.
We live now abroad and are still paying the price for hiring them. We ended up with a nightmare bills with Finanzamt, bank accounts locked up and a situation that is still haunting us today when we have moved out of Germany LAST YEAR.
As foreigners we sought the services of this accounting firm to help with our tax returns. We found that dealing with Finanzamt directly was actually much more efficient and even pleasant - yes, pleasant and efficient.
During the couple years doing our tax returns with “Spezialisten”, we had the most nightmarish and stressful situations you could think of, ending up having to take a loan to cover our taxes which could have easily been avoided had they done their job. The way they’re organized is you have one accountant and several assistants. It quickly becomes messy between them communicating with you starting multiple threads and not communicating with each other. Which leads to confusion and frustration.
Best part, it also leads to these assistants expressing their frustration at YOU the customer as a result of their communication mess. More serious than courtesy and professionalism in communications, this company failed to inform us of 1) being bumped up to a tax class that could require us to pay several years of taxes in advance (which happened) 2) one of us having to collect VAT for 2 years from freelance job which resulted in the worst situation of not being able to claim it back and pay VAT out of our own pocket.
In the face of that, you would think some empathy and/of some form of apologies. But instead we were met with increasing disregard and eventually actual rudeness.
One assistant deciding without consulting her boss that they would drop us as customers in the middle of the mess they created. You would also think the ONLY accountant in this company would make himself available to help advise.
But every time you had to talk to him to navigate their company’s mistake, you have to pay on top of everything else. This is already a long comment you may think, but really we’re only doing the short version here. As mentioned, please stay away.