Contributed by Kelly Malidore
When you open a small business, you want to do everything correct. Depending on your business you pick your location, choose your vendors, and develop your marketing plan. You may also contact a bookkeeper or accountant to handle the “business” side of things for you. While you may have a business that you are passionate about, most people are not passionate about crunching numbers or doing payroll for their business. It can be intimidating so you hire someone whom you believe to be competent in this area to take care of this portion of your business for you.
If you hired Lizzy Bee’s Tax and Accounting like we did, you would end up with a rude (and expensive) awakening. She presented herself as a CPA and an EA, as being very knowledgeable, and she answered every question we had. This gave us a false sense of security and trust with her. We hired her to handle the bookkeeping and payroll for True Colors Painting LLC.
By late 2018 I had finished college and was working as a bookkeeper. Lizzy was handling our payroll for us, but we were not getting our payroll on time. It would be 3 pm on payday and Nick still had no idea how much to pay his employees. He would have to call me at my office to run his payroll so he could pay his employees. When Lizzy would contact Nick, she would explain that the server had been down all day, or she had been on the phone with support all day. This happened numerous times within a two-month time frame. We informed Lizzy that we would be moving the bookkeeping and payroll over to where I worked as of January 2019. We still needed Lizzy to complete our business return for 2018, which she agreed to do since we had paid her monthly to input income/expenses into our books. Business returns are due to be filed with the IRS by March 15th, every year.
In February I touched base with her and was assured she was almost done with our business return. On March 12th I texted Lizzy again and she replied on March 16th with “I am wrapping them up now, I will email them to you this weekend”. I never received anything from her in either mine or my husband’s email. I and my husband texted and called her repeatedly for weeks and received no reply.
I hired another accountant on April 8th. Our accountant looked over our 2017 business return (which was prepared by Lizzy) and told us it was woefully incomplete nor done correctly. We fired Lizzy Bee’s with a Cease to Work letter and informed her that we would be having our 2018 business return completed by our new accountant. On May 17th, Lizzy finally responded to both the new accountant and myself in an email promising to deliver our 2018 business records so that we could complete our business return. She also attached proof that she had filed an extension with the IRS of our 2019 business return (the very same return that she had stated was complete and she would be emailing to us on March 16th).
We ended up having to amend our 2017 business return and our 2017 personal returns. We had to recreate our business income/expenses for our 2018 business return since Lizzy failed to return our business records to us (I guess you cannot return something that you never created in the first place). We had to pay thousands of dollars to correct or recreate everything that we had already paid Lizzy to do for us.
We had trusted Lizzy to do the job we were paying her to do so we could concentrate on building our business. How many people and businesses did she do this to? I began researching Lizzy Bee’s Tax and Accounting looking to see if this was just a one-off with our business or if there were more clients of hers that she had done this to. I was in for a second rude awakening when I dug beneath her “professional” image. She is not, nor has she ever been a CPA or an EA (Enrolled Agent). She never completed college nor did she have any degrees despite what she had told everyone. I continued to looking for instances of her deceptions and came across multiple business owners that she had also caused financial harm to, in most cases much worse than what was done to us. I spoke with these business owners and the story was always the same. The same lies, deceptions, side-stepping, promises, and excuses as to why something had not been done on her end.
I did not know what to do with the information that I had gathered as well as the proof of her deceptions. Then Lizzy decided to run for Mat-su Borough Assembly in District 2 and I knew that I had to make her deceptions and lies public in order to make sure she did not get elected.
