K1x Secures $175 Million for Private Markets AI Tax Tech
As demands for private market tax reporting and compliance surge.
TECH and FINTECH
Tax Season Leaves Accountants Drained, Disappointed
The Busy Season Barometer Shows Exactly When—and Why.
By CPA Trendlines
After starting near historic highs, sentiment among tax professionals fell more than 30 points by April, as workload, client behavior and system failures overwhelmed expectations.
MORE Busy Season Barometer | Join the survey. Get the results
The 2026 tax season began with confidence.
By December, sentiment among tax professionals had climbed to a positive 29.8—the strongest reading in the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer cycle. A majority expected better conditions. Few anticipated what came next.
By April, that optimism had vanished.
Accountant attitudes closed the season slightly negative, around -1 to -1.8, marking a swing of more than 30 points in four months.
It was one of the sharpest same-season reversals in the Barometer’s 24-year history, and it followed a pattern practitioners have seen before: expectations rising in the fall, then breaking under the weight of the season itself.
The difference in 2026 was the speed—and the causes.
21 Hard-Earned Lessons from Tax Season 2026
And What 20 Years of Data Say Comes Next
By CPA Trendlines Research
There is a ritual to tax season. It begins with anticipation dressed as control.
Practitioners tally the risks — the IRS, the law, the clients who will not deliver on time — and tell themselves this year will be different. Then the season starts. And it isn’t.
MORE Busy Season Barometer | Join the survey. Get the results
The CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer tracks that ritual across waves of surveys from September 2025 through April 2026 with more than 300 respondents.
The data show not a profession in crisis, but a profession under stress. Where pressures no longer arrive one at a time but stack up on each other. Where external shocks have been absorbed, and internal limits have come into view.
Tax season is full of noise, chaos and confusion. But a close look at the Busy Season Barometer from this year – and going back more than 20 years – can cut through the fog for the patterns, trends, insights and, most of all, the tough lessons learned.
Tax season 2026 gives us at least 21 essential takeaways.
Tipping Point: Accountants Scramble for AI-Enhanced Tax, GL, and Workflow Apps
New workflow systems expected to cut labor problems and shore up profit margins.
By CPA Trendlines Research
The CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer shows accounting firms are already planning changes to their technology and workflows, aiming to address the same pressures that defined this year’s busy season.
The research points to a profession broadly aligned with what needs to change, but much less aligned with how quickly those changes can be put into practice.
MORE Busy Season Barometer Join the survey. Get the results. | MORE Busy Season | MORE Tech and AI
Firms across the spectrum, whether reporting a better or worse tax season, identify similar priorities: improving efficiency, reducing manual work and making better use of technology.
Kenji Kuramoto: Basis Moves to Close AI’s Biggest Gap
When accountants and AI agents work side-by-side
“The future of the profession is accountants and agents working together,” Kuramoto says.
By Seth Fineberg
For CPA Trendlines
“Managing partner-in-residence” is not a standard role in accounting, and that was the first point of friction when Kenji Kuramoto was asked to explain his new job at Basis, the accounting AI agent company. What does that actually mean?
The answer goes beyond one hire. It points to a shift now underway in accounting: artificial intelligence is moving out of experimentation and into operations, and firms are not yet prepared for what that requires.
MORE Kenji Kuramoto: Behind Sorren’s Roll-Up: $170 Million, 1,000 Employees, 85 Partners | Kenji Kuramoto: Rules? What Rules? | Getting Real: Accounting Tech Decisions You Need to Make Today
MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network
Basis, at getbasis.ai, says that Kuramoto, founder of cloud pioneer Acuity, joined full-time to help firms transition to AI-enabled operations, working directly with customers and shaping the product. The company made clear this was not a symbolic role. “Kenji isn’t here to advise from the margins,” CEO Matthew Harpe says. “He’s a full-time member of this team… creating the product with us.” Kuramoto is embedded with the company, not observing from the outside.