Pros
-Meet great people. -Ability to get involved with the community in a number of ways. -A hyper competitive environment at the DM level and above (if you're into that kind of thing). -Opportunities for advancement at the DM level and above if you can capitalize on your relationships before the next reorganization.
Cons
-Constant corporate realignment ensure you won't have the same boss for more than 10 months. -Push for centralization is resulting on extremely wasteful spending on operational supplies at a time when labor is being cut drastically. -Little corporate or regional oversight concerning breaches of client privacy, tax preparer fraud or loss prevention. -The latest round of lay-offs has resulted in a "leaner" workforce at the field support office, which means that HR and payroll issues often take weeks to resolve and often require intervention at multiple layers to ensure complete execution. -Company has created a field operations position which takes operational control away from district managers. These operations people are responsible for all facilities issues, ordering supplies and the actual hiring of seasonal tax preparers. It has so far been a failure, leaving many district managers with previously unthinkable facilities issues and numerous HR issues (due to hiring not being executed properly.). While regional directors live within or near the regions they oversee, the managers in charge of field operations reside in Kansas City and rarely see the offices which they oversee. This is odd considering field operations is basically in charge of the appearance and physical condition of every office. To make matters worse, Field Operations Managers and Regional Directors did not have clear guidance on the specific responsibilities of the of the Operations Coordinators, which led to important operational projects incomplete or partially complete. Whenever something doesn't get done, Field Ops and Field Leadership seem to be constantly pointing fingers at each other while the tax preparers and their clients are left to suffer. -The retail tax business is in a severe contraction. As online tax preparation software takes more and more market share away from H&R Block, less tax offices and tax preparers are needed to support their business. Regional leadership is constantly trying to find ways to transition clients away from higher paid, experienced tax professionals to lower paid new tax professionals. They are doing this by implementing severe labor cuts which are targeted at senior tax pros. District managers are being told that senior tax pros should not be serving new clients and that only new tax pros should be seeing those clients.