Contenders and Defenders: Hazel and a new generation of AI tax and legal tools are challenging the old.
By CPA Trendlines
A major sell-off in brokerage and wealth management stocks followed the launch of a new AI-powered tax-planning tool by the financial technology platform Altruist.
Investors reacted sharply to the launch of Hazel AI, a feature within Altruist’s platform that automates complex tax strategies — a service traditionally handled by human advisors and high-fee wealth management firms.
The Internal Revenue Service is heading into the 2026 filing season with fewer employees, more complex tax law changes, and less capacity to resolve problems when returns go wrong — a combination federal watchdogs say will leave tax professionals managing the fallout even as headline service metrics appear stable.
National Taxpayer Advocate Erin M. Collins says most taxpayers with straightforward, electronically filed returns should see few disruptions. But she warned that the true test of the filing season will be how the IRS handles the millions of returns that require human intervention — at a time when the agency’s workforce has been cut by more than a quarter.
Why Tax Pros Are Imposing Standards on Themselves.
By CPA Trendlines Research
Scott Artman, NATP: New credentialing program
As the 2026 filing season begins, the National Association of Tax Professionals is launching a formal credentialing program for taxpayer representation.
The NATP is stepping into a regulatory void left by years of congressional inaction, leaving more than 500,000 paid preparers operating without national standards, even as IRS and GAO data show higher error rates on paid-prepared returns than on do-it-yourself filings, and Congress is delaying action.
Identity theft is becoming one of the biggest time drains for tax professionals this filing season, and the IRS may be less equipped than ever to handle it.
According to the IRS Advisory Council—the body representing tax professionals—identity-theft refund cases now take nearly two years to resolve, as staffing cuts and system limits slow IRS response.
But identity theft is only one of a long list of problems that can only get worse this year. Tax professionals are bracing for prolonged client disputes and frustrating follow-ups with an understaffed, ill-equipped IRS.
Why is the busy season better for CAS accountants?
CAS Comparison: At firms where CAS is the leading fee-generator, CAS accountants are handling half the book (left) and collecting 10 times the fees (right).
By CPA Trendlines Research
With busy season 2026, accountants specializing in client accounting services are reaping the benefits of a year’s worth of hard work, in a smoother path to April 15, more compliant clients, and higher fees, according to the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer.
The Busy Season Barometer marks the 2026 tax season as the breakthrough moment when CAS crosses from merely an aspirational experiment to a routine part of the service mix for small and midsize firms.
Tech plans: 43% of accountants say they’ll be working with new or upgraded versions of practice management & workflow apps, followed by 25% with tax prep packages.
By CPA Trendlines Research
With the 2026 filing season approaching, most accounting firms are not racing to rip and replace their technology stacks. Instead, they are making selective adjustments, tightening workflows, and cautiously experimenting with artificial intelligence — all while keeping a close eye on staffing limits, client behavior, and return on investment.
That restrained approach comes through clearly in CPA Trendlines’ Busy Season Barometer, which shows a profession that is less focused on transformation than on execution. The dominant theme across survey waves is not disruption, but discipline.
Accountants show renewed pricing power as rates gain 5.7%.
Mind the gap: CPA firms are raising billing rates at about a 6% rate, not quite enough to match the rising costs of staff.
By CPA Trendlines
CPA firms are raising prices again as they enter 2026, even as hiring remains weak and wage pressures show little sign of easing. The combination is tightening margins across the profession.
A CPA Trendlines analysis of new pricing data shows that billing rates for core CPA firm services are rebounding sharply, reversing an earlier soft patch and vaulting fees to near record highs. At the same time, employment growth across accounting firms has stalled, while wage growth remains elevated, underscoring the growing imbalance between pricing power and labor costs.
CPA firms heading into the 2026 tax season expect revenue gains driven primarily by higher prices, not by adding clients, even as a majority anticipate another heavy extension season.
According to the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer, about 6 in 10 firms expect total revenue to increase this year, while roughly one-third expect revenue to hold steady. Profit expectations trail revenue slightly, a pattern that points to continued cost pressure even as clients and would-be clients clamor for more, and more high-end, services
With only a week to go before the opening of filing season 2026, tax practitioners are focusing on IRS dysfunction as their biggest potential problem this year
And no wonder. The agency was already chronically underfunded, buried under a mountain of overdue paperwork, and crippled by ancient computer systems when it lost 25% of its workforce in early 2025.
Today 63% of tax professionals say a beleaguered IRS poses the single biggest risk to this year’s tax season, up from 54% just a couple of months ago, according to the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer.
On the front lines (clockwise from top left): Winke, Sosinski, D’Angelo, Parent, Kaplow, Gehring
By CPA Trendlines Research
Across the profession, accountants heading into the 2026 Busy Season are not sounding alarms, nor are they celebrating breakthroughs. Instead, they are settling into a steady, almost restrained confidence.
The latest Busy Season Barometer reveals that firms’ sense of readiness bears a striking resemblance to where they stood a year ago. For some, this signals resilience. For others, it signals stagnation. The portrait that emerges is a profession caught between incremental improvements and persistent operational friction.
Private equity-backed and PE-adjacent deals start the new year on a roll, with dozens of new combinations racing to year-end closes, driven by some of the biggest rollup platforms.
CPA Trendlines Research is adding 29 newly captured deals to the tracker, lifting the total to 147 deals since 2020 with more than $10 billion in new funding. The continuation of transactions into early 2026 suggests that 2025 was not a peak but a new normal, with deal flow stabilizing at a higher level than in the pre-2020 period.
CPA Trendlines estimates that today’s private-equity-driven revenue multiples imply an aggregate enterprise value of more than $400 billion for the Top 500 CPA firm sector as a whole — a valuation reset of more than $200 billion. READ MORE →
Expect strong demand for tax planning, business advisory and bookkeeping cleanup work.
By CPA Trendlines Research
The CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer indicates that tax and accounting leaders anticipate growth in their own firms, even as they prepare for anxious business clients, persistent inflation, and a policy environment that keeps planning on edge.
About half of all accountants in the survey are bracing for a deteriorating economy, with a third expecting rosier scenarios, for a net negative 17.2 percentage points. For small and mid-sized businesses, accountants are at a negative 9.3 points.
Pivoting with the Paradigm: Staff salaries are rising sharply even as job growth plateaus.
New jobs data signal fundamental pivot for accounting firms.
By CPA Trendlines Research
The year 2026 may be long remembered as the paradigm-shifting moment when accounting firms were forced to pivot everything from their business models to their budgets.
The reason: Salary and pay increases are accelerating even as hiring momentum stalls.
Going into 2026, labor costs have been cleaved from labor supply. The new, structurally higher staffing line is forcing firms to rewrite their budgets as well as business models.
As artificial intelligence transitions from a buzzword to a business imperative, CPA firms across the U.S. are quietly beginning to deploy generative AI assistants, machine learning tools, and “agentic” AI platforms to automate audits, prepare taxes, and provide financial insights.
With the astonishing surge in AI adoption, firm leaders say we’ve reached a tipping point where those not investing in AI risk being left behind.
In this Cornerstone Report, accounting firms show how they are leveraging AI to transform their operations, the benefits and challenges they are encountering, and what it all means for the future of the profession, including:
Why AI adoption in CPA firms has hit a tipping point
How agentic AI is transforming tax, audit, and advisory work
The real productivity, ROI, and revenue gains firms are reporting
What AI means for staffing, skills, and firm economics
The risks, governance challenges, and regulatory implications ahead
How firm leaders can deploy AI without falling behind
The accounting profession is changing faster than at any time in its modern history—and private equity is driving the shift. More than $30 billion in new capital has entered CPA firms since 2020, igniting a powerful wave of consolidation, modernization, and strategic reinvention. Firms that once relied on incremental growth and traditional partnership structures are now operating as high-performance platforms built for scale, technology adoption, and national reach.
The CPA PE Playbook is the most comprehensive analysis available today on this historic transformation.
If you want to know where the profession is heading, how PE-backed firms are competing, and what it will take to thrive in the next decade, this is the report you need.
Aaron Klein co-founded Nitrogen and led the company to 42 straight quarters of growth as its first CEO. He was named by Investment News as one of the industry’s 40 under 40 executives, and the Wealth Management Industry Awards honored him as CEO of the Year in 2023.
We face risks every day in our lives, from getting into our cars, to eating meals prepared at a restaurant, to flying in planes, to attending parades, sporting events and concerts. Rather than burying our heads in the sand, most of us get on with our daily lives by making calculated assumptions about what risks are safe and manageable and which ones are reckless.
When it comes to our money, however, risk plays all kinds of games on our emotions and often triggers our fight-or-flight response. The Securities & Exchange Commission defines financial risk as “the degree of uncertainty and/or potential financial loss inherent in an investment decision.” In general, as investment risks rise, investors seek higher returns to compensate themselves for taking such risks.
Bolton
Dan Bolton is vice president of corporate marketing at Nitrogen. He is the creator of the Fearless Investing Summit, one of the most dynamic and well-attended conferences in the wealth management profession, and launched the pre-eminent benchmark Advisor Growth Survey.
So, if you’re thinking of adding an investment advisory component to your accounting practice, just know that being crystal clear about each client’s unique tolerance for risk is the first step toward getting them invested properly.
What is risk tolerance?
Risk tolerance is an investor’s ability (and willingness) to endure market fluctuations and potential losses without abandoning their investment plan. READ MORE →
Client billing can include hourly billing, but it can also include flat-fee, retainer-based and/or value-based billing. Most people use one of these four methods. Some use all of them or even a hybrid. READ MORE →
Today’s Bissett Bullet: “It’s often a controversial point but some partners in our firms don’t want to learn how to sell. Invest your time and effort in those who do.”
By Martin Bissett
In today’s world of political correctness, I am about to violate the rules of ageism, sexism and probably racism. But, if you have got a 59-year-old white male tax partner in your firm it is unlikely, based on evidence, that they will want to learn new tricks. Therefore, leave them alone. They bring their own value to the firm.
Work on the partners, or senior managers, or up-and-coming rising stars and future leaders who show genuine hunger and desire for developing their rainmaking capabilities. Just because an existing partner is well established or is very good at what they do, it does not mean they have to be forced into a discipline that they are uncomfortable with.
Today’s To-Do:
Today, select the sales team of your firm. That might just be you, that might be you and colleagues, but form the team of the ones who are the hungriest, the most caring and the most ambitious, and get them the help they need to win new fees for your firm.
No matter what time of the year it is, it seems like there is never enough time for entrepreneurial accountants to get everything done. Here are three not-so-common ideas on how to make the most of your time.
If you were ever an employee, hopefully you got promoted to a higher position, leaving lower-paying tasks to someone else. Now that you are an entrepreneur, it’s time to do the same. Make a list of everything you are still doing that if an employer paid you, you would get $10 per hour. Then find someone to do those things. This will free you up to work more on your business and on the higher-payback things you may not be getting to now. READ MORE →
Busy season may still be a days out, but the stress response already starts to hum for a lot of accounting professionals — the calendar fills, the inbox tightens, and the margin for error feels like it shrinks to a sliver. In the latest Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, take that reality head-on with a surprisingly practical lens: modern stoicism.
They start by naming the misconception most people bring to the word “stoic” — that it means emotionless, rigid, “stone-faced.” Shimamoto, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, admits that’s how he learned it, too: a kind of unfeeling resilience.
But the article that sparks the episode — a Psychology Today piece on the science of stoicism — reframes it as something more useful (and more human): a set of attitudes and behaviors linked with resilience, lower anger and higher life satisfaction.
Contenders and Defenders: Hazel and a new generation of AI tax and legal tools are challenging the old.
By CPA Trendlines Research
Less capacity, more obligation.
Expect strong demand for tax planning, business advisory and bookkeeping cleanup work. 
