Greed has Ruined the Employee Experience at this Company - Tax Associate Tanner Employee Review

Busy season expectations are unclear and unreasonable (as some background, busy seasons range from February to mid April and August to mid October, which equates to a total of five months every year). It is hinted you should be around 60 billable hours per week, but you are also told the main priority is simply getting your work done. So if you work 60 hours, but don’t clear your bin, you get in trouble. If you work less than 60 hours, but get your bin cleared, more work is added to your bin, and you get in trouble for not working more. In my experience, I was never recognized for completing returns that were originally assigned to someone else, but was guilt tripped for times that other people helped with returns that were originally assigned to me. Also, in recent years, management has been firing the lowest performers at the end of every busy season. So even if you are doing a good job, it may not be perceived as good enough relative to the group. Salary absolutely does not sufficiently compensate for the amount of work you do. With all the overtime, micromanagement, and other annoyances of working here, I would have needed about 40% more to justify staying. And despite initial offers being at or slightly above market, annual raises are quite small. Unless you become a partner, you will be underpaid. Management is very stingy with bonuses. Despite boasting of record profits in every quarterly meeting, few people seem to actually get “busy season bonuses”. When these are received, they effectively equate to $3-5 ($1.5-3 after taxes) per hour of overtime you worked. “Open PTO” feels like a scam. One of the first things you are told after being hired is that "'Open PTO' does not translate to 'unlimited PTO'”. While there is supposedly not a limit on how much PTO you can use in a given year, it is explained in every firm wide meeting that people are using too much PTO and that we should stay below 20 days, or 160 hours (as a side note, you should expect to work between 300 - 400 hours of overtime throughout the year). I think the “Open PTO” policy is mainly used to seduce new recruits and to ensure management doesn’t have to pay out any unused vacation time when people quit. And people quit a lot here. Terrible feedback meetings. After every busy season, you meet with your coach, and sometimes a partner, to talk about your performance. In my experience, and in the experience of others I’ve talked to, these meetings focus almost entirely on negative criticisms. While this is done to foster improvement, it comes off as extremely brash and ungrateful. It is difficult to articulate just how disappointing it is to dedicate virtually all your time to a company for over two months without being recognized for the positive contributions you made during that time. Over emphasis on recruiting, very little effort in retention. Tanner is excellent at hiring top students because they say all the right things (largest CPA firm in Utah, work/life balance, resources of a larger firm but the feeling of a smaller firm, open PTO, etc.). Tanner has hired several dozen interns and new associates in the past few years. Only a very small portion of them will last longer than two years. Because of this wild turnover, people are constantly being hired from other CPA firms to fill in at the senior and manager level. This results in there being a relatively small number of people who actually know how to use the software, which makes them incapable of answering basic tax prep questions from interns and new associates. There is an attitude that every single client (yes, all 3,000 of them) is more important than you. There is virtually zero pushback on clients who are difficult to work with, take forever to respond to emails, or wait until the week of the deadline to turn in their information. Everyone complains about this, including management, but you are expected to deal with it. I would have loved to see just a single email to a client from a manager saying “Sorry, but we followed up with you on this multiple times three months ago, but got no response. It is October 13 and we are busy working on other returns now, and will not have time to complete this before the deadline in two days. We should be able to pick this back up in early November.” I saw nothing remotely like this during my entire tenure here. Instead, what you would get is a Teams message from the in-charge at 8:45pm saying, “Hey we finally got the new financials from X client. Do you have time to turn this around by tomorrow afternoon? I see you have seven other clients in your bin but it shouldn’t take too long.”