Michael Gray, CPA

UPDATE 07÷16÷08:
Received phone call from Michael Gray concerning this review. Mr. Gray apologized for the bad experience and offered to refund our entire consultation fee, which I happily accepted.
While I stand by my original review, it’s extremely encouraging to see a business care so much about both their reputation and one customer’s bad experience, particularly this long after it occurred.
It is only fair that you take this more-​than-​satisfactory corrective action into consideration along with the rest of my review.
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My wife’s company was recently acquired, which was an unexpected windfall for us. We made an appointment to discuss tax liability, AMT, and all the usual stuff (we figured) would be normal to ask a tax advisor about, particularly one who seems to specialize in incentive stock option issues.
We arrived at our scheduled time to locked doors, and stood in the rain knocking until someone let us in. That someone turned out to, apparently, be Michael Gray. He wasn’t friendly, warm, or helpful in any way, but hey, he’s a tax guy, so we were willing to cut a little slack.
I’ll make a long story short. We made it clear that we were looking to sell optioned stock, and wanted to do what we could to avoid AMT or any other situations where the IRS might suddenly decide we owe them our firstborn child. What we got were nebulous, unclear answers to every question we asked, a pervading sense of not really being interested in our situation, and a series of tips on how to change our withholding around, put proceeds in an interest-​bearing account, and pay the tax later, for a net savings of… $ 300, which was only slightly more than the fee charged for the consultation.
Thanks for the tip, but I’d have settled for satisfactory answers to the questions we asked. Something along the lines of, «You will not affect your AMT liability significantly by selling shares on any particular date, unless you go over the dollar amount $X in net proceeds» would have made the entire visit worthwhile, but that didn’t happen.
As we talked, «unhelpful» transitioned to «outright condescending». He managed to make my wife so angry that she implored me to just stand up and leave every time he walked out of the room — a feat I haven’t managed to accomplish myself in nearly two years of marriage.
Two stars only because the few tips we got made it not a *complete* waste of time, but we really did not get the help we wanted and would’ve liked our tax guy to at least pretend to be interested in our situation. We ended up just braving the tax landscape on our own. So far our future first child still belongs to us.