Client: “I need a list of all of the times I’ve visited your office.”

Me: “That’s a difficult request. Any particular reason?”

Client: “I’m in trouble with the police and I need it for my alibi.”

Me: “Did you need the full duration of the visit, or is arrival time good enough?”

Client: “I’d prefer the full duration”

Me: “Unfortunately, we only check in clients, we don’t check them out. Best I can do is a list of arrival times and the exact time we got paid at the end of the process… I might also have worse news. Did you come in for unscheduled visits outside of appointments at all?”

Client: “Yes, a couple times, why?”

Me: “We don’t record those.”

Client: “F***. S***. F***. I’m going to jail and it’s going to be all your fault.”

Me: “Not me specifically, I hope?”

Client: “No. Your company and your s***ty recordkeeping habits. F***. F***. S***. How am I going to prove where I was now?”

Me: “Perhaps mall security has video records? But you’d have to call them separately; it’s handled by the mall, and we don’t have access to the security cameras.”

Client: “How long do they keep the recordings do you think?”

Me: “Sorry. I have no idea.”

Client: “Well… thanks for that possible lead, I guess. My name is [Client’s Name], can you look up my appointments?”

Me: “Appointments are actually saved under phone number.”

Client: “I’m sorry, and I mean no harm to you, but what the f***? That’s a f***** up way of recording appointments. How do you know who came in? I know I just gave my name at the front desk.”

Me: “Your name is attached to your phone number, so we ask for that, but we can only search by phone number.”

Client: “So if I changed phone numbers, you wouldn’t be able to find my appointments?”

Me: “Yes”

Client: “S***. Now I gotta remember my old god-d*** phone number too. F***. Look, I’ll be in later today for that list with my phone number. Do you have some sort of manager I could talk to about it? I don’t want to make a scene in the lobby, but I’m very emotional right now.”

Me: “I can set you up with an appointment with a manager yes.”

Client: “Oh thank god.”

We got her appointment set up

I wish I had some sort of resolution for this but… well, she showed up and met with the manager in the soundproofed room for this sort of thing, and then left. The manager said he was able to get her what we had, but it wasn’t everything she wanted. I hope it went well for her?

I recall back in the 1990s having a conversation with a client when I was doing their taxes.

Client: “I’m so glad I have you to explain all this. It’s so difficult!”

Me: “Yeah, it can be tough to get through. We all study for years just to understand it.”

Client: “I’m just glad we live in a civilized country where they don’t blow up your house for not paying your taxes.”

Me: “I’m sorry, what?”

Client: “I saw on the news! Those people in Ireland must not be paying their taxes. The IRS keeps bombing their houses!”

Me: “That’s not the IRS, that’s the IRA.”

Client: “That’s what I meant the IRA. The Internal Revenue Association.”

There was a LOT to unpack there, but I did unpack it… and I didn’t even charge him for the lesson!

I work in the UK tax office, dealing with individuals and companies that have significant (>£500k) outstanding debts. I get a call in from a gentleman, who is the director of a company that owes approximately £750k in taxes. This was a forty-five minute long, rambling call, so I’ve paraphrased and condensed the conversation.

Me: “Good morning, sir, how can I help you?”

Caller: “I have received a letter in the post today about some outstanding taxes, and I was highly insulted to see that you’re taking me to court!”

Me: “Of course sir, if you can just complete some verification questions, I would be very happy to discuss the actions that HMRC might be taking on this account.”

I could see at this point that we weren’t yet taking legal action, the letter was our first reminder letter, which has a line saying that we *might* escalate to legal action. The letter also states that we are very willing to discuss the case before anything is done.

Caller: “Why should I verify who I am, you clearly have my account open!”

Me: “Sir, I legally have to confirm your identity before I can disclose any details of this account.”

Caller: “But I just disclosed my details to you when I announced that I owe you tax!”

Me: “Yes, sir, you did, which you have the right to as the controller of your own data, you can disclose whatever you want, to whoever you want. I am under much stricter legal guidelines and cannot continue these discussions today unless I can verify who you are.”

Caller: “But this company has paid its taxes on time for the last SIXTY years, why are you stopping us doing so now?!”

Me: “Sir, I am not refusing any discussions, I just need to verify some details, and then we can continue.”

This continued for a few more minutes, before I finally managed to get the details I needed and start the actual call. I’d been on the phone to him for over ten minutes by this point. As soon as I complete the security questions, he immediately comes out with this:

Caller: “We can offer you twenty-two monthly payments to pay off the debt.”

Please note that for these types of negotiations, I am legally barred from giving the customer a target length to pay the debt by, as that constitutes extortion (Pay in three months or we sue you does NOT fly well in court), so I can only say no and ask for a better proposal.

Me: “I am sorry sir, but that is too long of a length of time, this debt was due two years ago, and it’s corporation tax, so you were making a profit at the time you accrued this debt and we would have expected you to have saved the money for now. May I ask why you are unable to pay in full today?”

Caller: “Why are you asking these questions, do you not trust me? I’m an eighty-seven-year-old gentlemen that has always paid his debts on time, why are you not granting me this simple favour?”

Me: “Sir, we do not discriminate by age, and these payment plans are not a right, we grant them at our discretion based on your company’s circumstances. May I ask why you are unable to pay today?”

Caller: “I’m old enough to remember the war, I don’t need to do anything to get you to grant me this plan! My company will be paying you £34,000 a month, and that is that!”

Me: “Sir, we have not come to an agreement today and we will be continuing with recovery actions on this debt unless you can answer the questions I’ve asked today.”

Caller: “You do what you want, I remember not being scared in ’45, and I’m not scared of you!”

He then ended the call. I sent off our final warning letter, and then got up from my desk and had to decompress for fifteen minutes before coming back. This remains the only call I’ve ever needed to walk away from.

Like in this story, we also had a phantom p*sser at work.

One of our accountants was from China, and she wore soft slippers indoors and soled shoes outdoors. She didn’t like the idea of carrying her slippers from home to the office, so she bought a pair of soft moccasins to wear in the office, which she would leave at her desk.

One day, [Accountant] came into work to find her moccasins missing. We all searched the office together because theft is a serious issue, and we found one of them behind the radiator, still damp with something that really stank.

We didn’t find the other. The office was rife with speculation. Accounting can be very boring work unless something goes wrong, and we ran a smooth and well-oiled office, so the mystery of who was going around at night stealing moccasins was the talk of the department.

About two weeks later, we got a lead. While [Accountant] was away from her desk, a grey cat darted under it, grabbed one of her sneakers, and darted away — in front of witnesses.

I followed the cat. It takes a certain amount of skill to follow a cat — they don’t like being followed and have very good eyesight and hearing — but I managed to trail the cat to a crack in the cinderblocks that made up the exterior wall, which the cat squeezed itself and the shoe into.

We got an RC vehicle with a camera and sent it into the wall after the cat. We found that the cat had had kittens and had lined her little nest with the stolen moccasin and shoe, presumably to keep them warm.

We called an animal removal agency, and they caught and relocated the cat and kittens to presumably friendly homes.

We then began the long and arduous process of getting the landlord to repair the obviously broken wall, and that could probably be its own Not Always Right story.

Related:
Geez, Who Peed In Your Shoes? Wait…

I work at a tax office. I don’t do people’s taxes; I schedule and answer the phones. In early January, one guy calls in, and he’s very insistent that he wants to come in on April 18th exactly, the very last day, to do his taxes.

I try to get him to come in sooner.

Me: “Would you prefer late March? How about early April? Maybe you want to file an extension? It’s dangerous to schedule for the last day; something could go wrong and your taxes might not be filed.”

No. Apparently, extensions are just a scam by Big Tax to make more money, and he seems to think that he’s required to make his payment to the government the same day he files, so he doesn’t want to do that any sooner than possible so he can “earn interest” off of that money.

How much money you can “earn in interest” from a tax bill over a couple of weeks seems weak to me, but also, as I try to explain, you can schedule the payment to occur later than when you file.

Customer: “I don’t care! I want the last day possible. Stop arguing with me and just do it! You all argue with me about this every year. The customer is always right!”

Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d had this conversation with this guy; he was correct that this conversation had happened every year for three years running. 

But 2023 was different. This year, on the second to last day of tax season, something went wrong. There was an electrical short in our office, and the ceiling tiles caught fire. We had to evacuate, and we were closed on April 18th as a result.

And our procrastinator? He had to pay the government a failure-to-file and failure-to-pay penalty due to his late filing.

This year, 2024, he called in again. This time when I offered to have him an extension with us, just in case, he accepted the offer.