The most successful accountants aren’t the ones who pitch the hardest, they’re the ones who listen the most. When you ask better questions, you can diagnose problems that clients didn’t even know they had, which then helps us clarify outcomes instead of listing services. When we shift from “convincing” to “consulting,” discovery calls stop being “sales” conversations and start becoming advisory conversations. And advisory conversations naturally lead to advisory engagements.

A short but busy month in Tax Court, with the non-shutdown, new wrinkles in law and regulation, and, as always, problems arcane and mundane; so let's jump in.

In tighter job markets, recruits are often offered signing bonuses (and sometimes moving expenses) to join a firm. Sometimes construction workers temporarily relocate to jobs in other states while they are employed by the company that hired them in their home state. This article reviews some of the foundational tax concepts to consider when evaluating sourcing of income for state tax purposes.

Tax pros help clients with a lot of catastrophes: wrangles with tax authorities, paltry nest eggs, more wrangles with tax authorities. More frequently, your clients might face a more tangible and cinematic disaster. These days, there’s always a storm comin’. Swept away in that destruction, for many people, are physical tax and financial records. A few precautions could have prevented such loss and made life at least a bit easier for victims. Here’s how to help clients head off trouble – and recover after it hits.

The Cohan rule is named for George M. Cohan. George Michael Cohan (1878 – 1942) was a theatrical producer. In the decade before World War I, he was called the “man who owned Broadway” and is considered the father of American musical comedy. In 1940 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his contribution to morale during World War I with his songs “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Over There,” the first time the medal was awarded to someone in an artistic field. But his most enduring legacy may be the tax rule that shared its name.

Let’s be direct: AI is one of the most powerful capacity tools tax professionals have seen in decades. Used correctly, it buys you time you can reinvest into high-value advisory: planning, structuring, audits, negotiations, strategy, client education, and relationship building. But here’s the catch that you as an elite tax practitioner already understand: aggressive planning requires rigorous defensibility. If you’re going to use AI to accelerate complex planning work, your defense file must be stronger, not weaker. This playbook gives you that: a practical framework that keeps you safe while you scale.

Why aren’t more veterans using the benefits they’ve earned? Part of the problem is awareness, and part of it is discomfort (for both veterans and advisors). After all, veteran benefits are rooted in service-connected health and trauma, placing them in a category that often feels more personal than financial. That alone can deter veterans from discussing their disability compensation and keep advisors from broaching the subject altogether. The result is financial plans that look optimized on paper but are built on incomplete assumptions and missed opportunities – opportunities that have been more than earned.

The mere mention of a WISP makes most tax professionals want to suddenly lose their internet connection. It sounds bureaucratic, technical, and deeply unfun. But here’s the good news: creating and maintaining a WISP does not have to feel like a compliance root canal. And ignoring it can turn into something far worse than an IRS audit. Let’s talk about why you need one, what it’s actually supposed to do, and how to get it done without wrecking your sanity in the middle of filing season.