In spite of your insightful responses warning me about the contractor position & my gut feelings, I went ahead & signed the contract. Though I knew I was stepping down as far as pay is concerned, I felt that I could learn a lot, gain more experience preparing corporate returns & doing bookkeeping & at the same time I can study for the CPA exam even during tax season with short commute & working less hours.
Till the day I joined, I was given the impression that the CPA firm occupied the whole suite. There were 2-3 front desk people. While waiting in the lobby, I could see a big conference room since it had a glass wall. The first interview was conducted in a room which I assumed was the office of the non CPA partner who interviewed me. When I even asked whether it is a paperless office, the partner showed the desk & room & said yes, it is a paperless office. She did say that their firm is a boutique firm. The 2nd interview when the CPA joined the non CPA partner, was conducted in a smaller conference room (different room than the one I saw from the lobby). Imagine my surprise when I found out the 1st day of work that the CPA firm is a one room office in a shared suite. There is a bigger desk which is mainly used by the non CPA partner who comes to office almost everyday & shared with the CPA partner who comes for a few hours 1 or 2 days in a week & mostly works remote. Another smaller desk is used by a part time employee. There are only 3 chairs in the room & if all 4 of us are working at the office, they had to borrow a chair from another office.
During the 2nd interview, I was told that they plan to pay $20/hr. I explained to them that that was my pay during my 2nd tax season & that I am not a beginner. The next day they sent me the contract with pay of $25 for tax preparation & $22 for bookkeeping, which is when I posted here asking for suggestions. With my own research, I found that to convert W2 hourly pay to contractor hourly pay, the latter should be more since we have to pay self employment taxes. Since I am covered by my husband's firm, health insurance was not a big deal & I did not consider that into the equation. So in addition to uneasy feeling due to the contract terms mentioned in my original post & the low pay they offered, I felt I was at a disadvantage. Yet I signed the contract due to above mentioned reasons.
The other thing that is of concern is that even before the 1st day, I was given directions as to which day & time to report. Since they had not installed the needed things in the laptop they were going to give me on the 1st day I started, I was told to come the following Tuesday at 10:30. So basically they get to tell me the time & day I was supposed to come to work which is what an employer does to his/her employees. Independent contractor status & pay but employee work terms.
My very 2nd corporate return I was given was a complicated one. The clients' expenses were not itemized properly. The expenses for each category was given on a monthly basis instead of annual basis. Plus, the client had left off some expenses, so reconciliation could not be done. The non CPA partner took over & then rearranged the expenses, prepared a pivot table, then added the expenses paid by debit card to the expenses paid by checks & just as I found out, some expenses were left out by the client. So during my work review, I was told that it was a simple return & it took only 1 hour for the partner to complete it. This was after she had got all the information from the client who had to be told twice that the expenses had to be properly itemized & total annual expenses had to be provided. Even then the client itemized the expenses but did not convert them to annual basis for each category. They said that due to learning curve, 2 hours would be reasonable for me to complete it & not anything more than that. The same happened with another return due to other complications. Personally I feel that 2 hours would not be enough to go through the prior return, do reconciliation, send emails to partner about the itemization issue, read the responses, go through the updated documents from the client & then lastly complete the return. So today I was grilled by both partners during my performance review. Though the whole discussion was on a decent level, I still felt like I was treated like dirt or worse. But the whole time I managed to stay calm in explaining my situation, asked questions about the returns & pointed out some liabilities that were left out & tax preparation fees added to taxes in the return completed by the partner.
Also, the non partner mentioned that the job does not involve mere data entries but work with understanding of what needs to be done. While I also agreed to that, I mentioned that the contract had included making data entries in the job description for tax preparer, to which the non CPA partner replied that she is an authority in preparing contracts & that there is nothing wrong in mentioning data entries contradicting to what she said as her expectation.
With this kind of a stifling atmosphere with a bossy partner who argues for the smallest things, tries to manipulate the situation, having double standards, I really don't feel like continuing. I am planning to prove myself by preparing a complicated corporate return even if the clients documents are messy & then given notice tot the firm. On the other hand, I can stick it out for the whole 6 months of contract time & then leave. But I am not sure I can take it for 6 months.
Sorry for the long post. Appreciate your suggestions & feedback.
FAR - < than 75, 10/2013, 2/2015
BEC - < than 75, 10/2013
AUD - < than 75, 8/2015, 1/2016
~ Winners fail until they succeed. Losers quit when they fail. - Robert Kiyosaki
~ I survived because the fire inside burned brighter than the fire around me.
~ Something will grow from all you are going through. And it will be YOU.
~ Right now you may not be where you intend to be, but it's where you need to be in order to get where you want to go.
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