After accounting startup Bench abruptly shut down on December 27 and was bought in a fire-sale by Employer.com, Bench customers are now learning they can’t easily just take their financial data and leave. 

And some are very unhappy about it, three customers told TechCrunch.

To recap: When Bench, a startup based in Canada that raised $113 million from investors like Bain Capital Ventures and Shopify, shuttered, it left thousands of businesses without access to their accounting and tax documents. Days later, Bench announced it would be acquired by Employer.com for an undisclosed price in a last-minute deal.

San Francisco-based HR tech company Employer.com focuses on payroll and onboarding, in contrast to Bench, which specializes in accounting and tax. 

On the surface, Employer.com appears to be a relatively new company: Its CEO, Jesse Tinsley, announced his acquisition of the domain name in November for about $450,000. Tinsley is behind a host of HR, onboarding, and recruiting-related businesses, including Recruiter.com and BountyJobs.

However, digging deeper, TechCrunch learned that Employer.com is a dba for Recruiting.com Ventures. Tinsley acquired Recruiter.com in 2023, when it was a Nasdaq-listed company, and took it private, according to Employer.com CMO Matt Charney. That entity has been around since 2015, he said. 

In its consent form, Bench described Employer.com as a “highly successful and profitable organization with a proven track record of acquiring and running companies over the past decade.” CMO Charney said the company is in fact profitable. However, Employer.com’s lack of accounting and tax expertise is concerning to some Bench customers.

One Bench customer told TechCrunch that when he tried to get his records for two out of the five years that he was a Bench customer, he was asked “to hit a consent button.”

“Within the text of that page they said if you consent, then you agree to no refunds, and I think that was a very slimy, low thing to do,” he added. The company then later changed the page to remove mention of not being able to get a refund. 

Below is a screenshot of the original consent page before Employer.com updated it:

The customer said he was able to contact his credit card company and get a refund for two years of service he had pre-paid for. But he was still unhappy with the treatment.

“It’s disappointing because I used to speak so highly of them and had clients working with them too,” he said.

Another longtime customer said that Employer.com “showed a message” on Bench offering the users a choice to either continue service and accept updated terms or discontinue service and download data. He chose the latter. 

“A few days later I got a message that said that in order to export your data, you still have to accept the terms,” he said. “In this case, I hit accept just to continue and deal with this general issue, but it’s relatively suspicious to force the users to do this in order to transfer out their data. Accepting these terms opted me into continuing to use the Bench services.”

In other words, it appears that Bench customers had to agree to transfer their data to Employer.com to be able to access that data.

Below is a screenshot of what the customer, who had been a Bench client for 10 years, received.

The customer decided that he didn’t feel comfortable with remaining a client because Employer.com “does not appear..familiar with really operating this kind of business.” He’s reviewing his options for an alternative provider.

Another customer, Michelle Gayle, who serves as a business advisor to Core Insights Group, said she understood that her company – which is owned by her husband – would be able to download its data after consenting to certain terms.

She told TechCrunch that the company updated its consent page, getting rid of the option to opt out of transferring to Employer.com. Below is a screenshot of the updated page.

“They have concealed the fact that this new ‘acknowledgement’ is the same as the previous ‘consent’ and it is backed up by a privacy policy that is not adequate for the financial services that Bench.com provides,” she said. ”Additionally, they are offering discounts on recruitment services which seem tone deaf and inappropriate given this situation.”

She went on to describe Employer.com’s privacy policy as laughable. 

“This policy has absolutely nothing to do with safeguarding financial data and when I tried to email legal@employer.com about this woefully inadequate policy, I received a bounce back message,” she added.

The above complaints are echoed on a reddit thread full of comments of disappointed former customers.

For its part, Employer.com says customers can access their data by providing consent, which authorizes Employer.com “to make their data available for download.” 

“After consenting, customers can manage their data, including downloading, deleting, or continuing services on the platform,” Employer.com’s Charney told TechCrunch. “Once consent is given, they can choose to continue with the same contract and pricing as before or cancel their service.”

As for customers seeking refunds for advance payments they made that covered future services that the defunct Bench will no longer deliver, Charney said they will need to contact the bankruptcy trustee for Bench Accounting Inc. or attempt to request a refund through Stripe.

Post-publication, Charney provided the following quote regarding the consent around customer data: “Simply put, the only way that they can get their data at all is to opt into giving Employer.com permission to access their data, because the only other entity that currently has that data to begin with no longer exists and is in active bankruptcy proceedings.  So if they don’t consent to give Employer.com access, then they’re not going to get that data at all. It’s really the only way we can make sure that any Bench customer, whether or not they choose to remain one, can access those records. We will delete all data of any user who chooses to opt out immediately after they download the data, and will not retain any of their information at all.”

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