Complaint Review: Economic Strategist Dallas Texas - Addison Texas

In December of 2018 I was introduced to Rich Farr a representitive of Economic Strategist and he asked me to come in for a financial planning session. I said no several times but he was adamant about it so I finally caved. 

I arrived at their lavish offices in Addison Texas and was presented with a plan to minimize my tax exposure to the IRS. Duncan Macdonald who represented himself to me as Duncan John told me he was the owner and CEO of the company. The reason he went by Duncan John is because he is a convicted felon for running a ponzi scheme and is currently on Federal probation in the Northern Distric of Texas.

Unbeknownst to me about previous crimes, I was advised that I had over paid on my taxes for the past 3 fiscal years. They presented a plan that would get me between $400,000 and $700,000 in tax money back due to overpayment. 

This sounded amazing so I wired them $115,000 for estate planning and this Spendthrift trust that they said they were the only ones who could create the instrument. Turns out these are normal instruments and they run about $10,000 from any attorney or financial planner on the planet. 

Flash forward to May of 2019, my taxes still hadn't been filed and I had no refund in sight. I called to find out what happend and they said they never said they could get me money back and started being very unprofessional and scatter brained. This caused for alarm and as I searched around I found out that not only was the CEO Dunan Macdonald a felon, the general counsel Mark Deubner has also had a run in with the feds for insider training which he paid a fine and settled for. 

The entire company is ran by crooks!

I never got my refund (it's 2020) and they didn't file my taxes on time NOR did they file them correctly, which means I got audited by the IRS for 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. 

Now I've been paying taxes for my entire adult life without issues and then I get audited for ONLY the years they were supposed to handle. I addressed this with them and they blamed me for bad bookkeeping. Yet I never had problems until then

I spoke with the IRS agent and he told me Economic Strategist failed to file my taxes properly which is what led to the audit. He told me they filed back taxes from 2016, 2017 and 2018 with an EIN number on a trust issued in 2019 which was fraudulent. They even forgot to file my 2018 taxes even though I paid upwards of $30k in addtion to the $115,000 for all this. 

These guys are under investigation from more 3 letter acronym government agencies than I can count. How do I know? These agencies have reached out to me and about 50 other clients of theirs to take statements. 

On top of that Duncan told me he did Donald Trumps taxes and estate planning. Which was a lie. He told me he had done 30,000+ of these trust in his company, another lie. 

If you get approached by anyone in Economic Strategist run. They are in HUGE trouble and I'm having to sue them to get my money back. 

Unless you like having your estate planning done by 2 felons who have got in trouble for financial crimes in the last decade, don't do business with these guys. They are bad bad news.