H&R Block reviews

H&R Block has historically had a poor track record of women in leadership, with a decreasing number of women in senior leadership positions after Jeff Jones became CEO in October 2017. After my departure and complaints, they have attempted to address and improve this (from 2022 onward)... Which is good, but I wonder how much of the culture is actually authentically better. While I was at H&R Block, there was a boys-club culture within the company, with men frequently socializing outside of work without including women. The majority of men in director, VP, and CIO positions have stay-at-home wives, which perpetuated the stereotype that women should not hold executive leadership positions. As a leader, I faced a pattern of sexism and marginalization. Despite championing innovative and efficient solutions to improve the company's operations and generating outstanding results within my area of responsibility, my ideas were dismissed or ignored by male colleagues and my director superior. This lead to delays and missed opportunities. Some ideas I presented would only be adopted many months later if they were championed by a male leader. Additionally, I was criticized for telling the truth about the limitations of the company's technology and for my efforts to improve the IT department's organization which is plagued with incompetence in its leadership. Technical and system outages have occurred frequently, causing potential harm to the business. Overall, during my time at H&R Block, I experienced a pattern of gender discrimination and a lack of support despite my substantial contributions and exceptional leadership skills. Being a rock star is intimidating to folks at the company that have decades-long tenures and lackluster performance. They'd rather accept the status quo than see the company succeed.

Having been utterly trounced in the tax preparation wars by industry leader Intuit (TurboTax), H&R Block continues its slow, sad slide into irrelevancy. I joined this team as a pre-retirement denouement to get back to my roots as a tax attorney doing tax law research after many years at another company serving as a manager/administrator. I resigned in disgust after less than seven months. The position was completely misrepresented to me. I was led to believe, again and again throughout the interview process, that the work was strictly responding to written questions submitted by their (so-called) "tax professionals" (many of whom are hopeless tax illiterates). As soon as I arrived, I was informed that no, in fact much of the work involved being a chat agent, which I never agreed to do and never would have left my old firm or role to lower myself to. They also lied about why the position was available (turnover). They engage in the "unlimited PTO" maneuver that is so common at Silicon Valley firms (i.e., it really means no vacation time at all, since the supervisor never approves it). As a potential remote worker, I specifically asked about the parameters for working while traveling. I was told, unambiguously, that I could work from anywhere within the United States. Then, when I openly and honestly mentioned that I was spending the day working from a location that was not my home, I was immediately reprimanded in writing and threatened with termination. So I saved them the trouble and quit. "TREX," as it's casually called, is a thoroughly dysfunctional team operating in a toxic environment. I was the second resignation (out of a team of only 10) in literally less than three weeks. Avoid this position, team and company at all costs.