As the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, filed a lawsuit against H&R Block, claiming that the firm steered poor people into retirement accounts designed to lose money, the accounts were being marketed yesterday in offices in the city.

At two branches in Manhattan – in the financial district and TriBeCa – pamphlets advertising the accounts were available for the taking yesterday.

Mr. Spitzer charged that employees for H&R Block failed to disclose a multitude of fees associated with their Express IRAs, while advertising the money market accounts as “a good way to save when in fact it was not.” He announced the lawsuit against the country’s largest tax preparation company at a press conference.

The account fees charged outpace the interest gained in 85% of the more than 500,000 such accounts H&R Block opened nationwide in the past four years, according to the legal complaint. Mr. Spitzer said 30,000 New Yorkers held H&R Block Express IRAs.

H&R Block responded yesterday by claiming the accounts have encouraged many Americans to save money for the first time in an era when few do so.

“Make no mistake – we believe in the Express IRA product and are proud of the opportunities it presents for our clients,” the CEO of H&R Block, Mark Ernst, said in a statement. “At a time when the country’s personal savings rate has declined to minus 0.7%, we’ve helped 596,000 of our clients begin saving for their future, and more than 40% of them had never saved before.”

H&R Block is represented in part by a former New York attorney general, Robert Abrams, according to a company press release.

There is nothing illegal about not offering a good deal. But the legal complaint, filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan yesterday, alleges that H&R Block misled customers as they opened retirement accounts.

By accusing the company of providing misleading investment advice and failing to disclose their conflicts of interest, the lawsuit is an aggressive regulatory action of the type more likely to come from the Securities and Exchange Commission than a state attorney general, one legal expert said.

A law professor at Columbia University, John Coffee, said, “I do think Mr. Spitzer has found a new area of consumer finance that no other regulators have yet examined. He’s put forward a convincing critique on the face of this.”

Mr. Spitzer is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

At the office in the financial district, employees kept up the upbeat patter of financial advice yesterday as well as offering literature advertising the disputed Express IRAs. Employees declined to discuss the lawsuit, referring all questions to H &R Block’s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo.

Two pamphlets about H&R Block retirement accounts disclose differing information in fine print about the fees account holders pay. One pamphlet mentions “annual maintenance fees” for accounts worth less than $1,000. The other only warns that withdrawals made before the client turned 59 1/2 may lead to a fine.

Both pamphlets describe the accounts in encouraging terms. “The sooner you start, the more you’ll save,” one read. “So don’t put off preparing for the future.”

The lawsuit claims, “The situation is worse for H&R Block’s poorest customers, whom H&R Block claims it is helping.” Fees are highest for those accounts with balances of less than $1,000. “For the last several years, the median Express IRA account, with a balance of $323, has earned about $3.00 in interest per year, nowhere enough to cover the $10 annual maintenance fee for the product, much less inflation and other Express IRA fees.”

But at least one independent researcher has disputed claims that the accounts prey on the poor.

“We examined the Express IRA product and found that over time it holds promise as a useful way to help many families start saving at tax time,” the director of the Initiative on Financial Security at the Aspen Institute, Lisa Mensah, said in a statement. “Given the national challenge of retirement savings, it is a dangerous precedent to punish the innovative efforts of the private sector to design and provide a product to help low and moderate income people begin saving for retirement.”

Although there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who may have been losing money through these accounts, Mr. Spitzer said a whistleblower brought the questionable practices to the attention of investigators. He said “someone inside the company” contacted his office and spoke of the “discomfort” that many employees felt in marketing the accounts. Mr. Spitzer also said his office received complaints from consumers.

Through the lawsuit, New York State seeks to force H&R Block to pay restitution as well as penalties of at least $250 million.

The lawsuit is likely to attract similar suits elsewhere in the country, Mr. Coffee said. H&R Block currently faces a number of class action lawsuits in other states over its program of providing loans against anticipated tax refunds.