Then soon after, his due to personal family circumstances, he decided to an 5 months 'sabbatical'.

During which period, despite my numerous emails and phone calls, all I had was his assistant contacting me back to say that they had applied for an extension.

By the time I have finally managed to taken back my documents from him, and appointed a new accountant to deal with my case, it was late August and it resulted in incurring a penalty and an interest from IRS.

I have requested that he should give me a refund of his fee as all he did was to apply for an 'unnecessary' extension and got his assistant to print out my emails. Not to mention the unnecessary penalty and interest!

But his reply was:

'It was your decision to use a different professional. As I told you then I already had time in on your work. Since you were referred by a mutual friend I told you that the deposit of $500 was sufficient. Under different circumstances I would have sent you a bill for considerably more. you should request that the person who prepared the return to try to get the penalty abated. Or if you like, for a fee, I will review the filed return(s) and attempt to abate the penalty.'

After 5 months of sleepless nights, by the time he said he has 'time to do my returns' I wasn't going to 'risk' trusting him to do it before the expiration of the extension deadline in Oct.

Any decent accountant would have offered me a refund ( at least minus his assistant's admin cost) and an apology. (My new accountant seems to think so! ) This is a despicable behavior.