Mikey Campbell
Apple on Friday said it fixed an apparent backend Apple Card issue that caused certain AT&T charges to show up as billings from "Waters, Hardy & Co.," though the small Texas tax firm continues to see a deluge of calls from confused customers.
The tech giant contacted Waters, Hardy & Co. to say the mixup was corrected, but the firm's partner, Richard Waters, CPA, suggests the fix has not yet rolled out to all impacted customers.
"Apple contacted us and said it was fixed," Waters told AppleInsider in an email. "We turned on the phones and got swamped again. Perhaps it will take time to work through the system."
Waters was forced to disable the firm's phone lines yesterday after being overrun with calls from Apple Card customers wanting to know why charges from an unknown tax company are showing up on their Apple Card statements.
Trouble started on Thursday when Apple Card owners reported seemingly erroneous transactions appear in the Apple Card section of the Wallet app. Some traced the error back to mislabeled AT&T charges.
The incident has caused serious difficulties for the small company. A 10-person outfit, Waters, Hardy & Co. staff is working overtime to complete clients' extended income tax returns by the Nov. 15 filing deadline. Answering calls from confused Apple Card owners eats up valuable time, and the onslaught means its own clients are unable to get through.
"This has been an incredible challenge for us," Waters said. "Our staff have been having to answer the phones instead of working on our clients' returns. None of our clients are able to get through to us. It is so bad, we had to turn on the auto operator and leave a message to the callers explaining what has happened."
Waters was unable to contact representatives at Apple, AT&T or Goldman Sachs yesterday.
Apple has yet to comment on the issue and the cause of the mistake remains unknown.
Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
6 Comments
Error in the article: October 15 is the filing deadline for those who filed for extensions, not November 15.
And still no word from Goldman Sachs who are likely the real source of the problem with this. They owe this accounting firm a week of free lunches.
I have failed Goldman Sachs' (GS) identity verification interviews four out of four times since February. The identity interviews are administered by phone from a live, GS bank employee. Some of the GS identity questions are fundamentally faulty which cannot possibly be answered correctly. The exception would be that the question(s) are 'trick questions'. I have since twice spoken to GS managers who discount the notion of 'trick questions'. The two GS managers I have spoken with have been sympathetic to my plight and agree with my description of faulty interview questions. Each time they have 'escalated' the issue, yet the responses I've received so far from the 'escalation' is just more f*%king GS emails "inviting" me to reapply. In other words, no one with the capacity to correct the faulty interview is examining the details of the story passed up by the two managers with whom I've submitted my story. Goldman Sachs is ONE BIG FAILURE.
G-S been bery bery good to me, and over all, I expect us Apple Card holders are fairly happy with them, so the ONE BIG FAILURE doesn't seem that big in the grand scheme of things. Sorry to hear of the problems you're having.
“Answering calls from confused Apple Card owners eats up valuable time, and the onslaught means its own clients are unable to get through”.
They should bill Apple (or whoever f’d up) for their time.