H&R Block

We were doing seminar on taxes for our international staff on campus and asked H&R Block to do a presentation. We had high hopes and booked them well in advance. We asked for their schedule of topics but after weeks, we never received anything.
Today we set up the room and are getting ready for the presentation. They bring 5 people for their talk and we’re setting up the PowerPoint in the projector. Soon the room fills up and we get started.
They asked us to do our part first, which we did. It lasted about 30 minutes and went over the different types of categories that our employees fell into for tax purposes. Then they had one of the ladies get up to do their presentation. Which was basically reiterating everything we’d just said, but with much more complicated language (do I even need to mention that since they are international, not all of them speak the best English?!) – not good. Then they were done. Literally. Three slides of regurgitation and a nice blurb about H&R Block.
So we move to Q&A time. Out of the 5 people, only 2 of the women spoke up ever and they couldn’t seem to agree on anything. There was contradiction with percentages, types of items that could be deducted, and anytime they didn’t really want to (or couldn’t) get into the topic, they just said to go to a tax professional for that kind of information and trust them. That isn’t necessarily what you want to hear.
I will say that I’m sure these women do not deal with international taxes very often – however, since they were booked well in advance a little bit of research couldn’t have hurt. Most questions were answered by my department and it was just another sign of unprofessionalism.
In the end, they finally gave up trying to answer the Q&A so they started consulting people individually while the rest of us were still talking. We’d planned to do a few more sessions for our employees, but with poor performance like this, I doubt we’ll ever call them back to do a presentation for us again.