Steven Jarvis: Hello everyone, welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast. I’m your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA, and joining me once again on the show, it’s been about two years. It seems like we do it about every two years, but Michael Eckstein, welcome back.

Michael Eckstein: Howdy.

Steven Jarvis: We’ll have to jump in and share some time with a fellow tax professional, someone who can represent enrolled agents and shed light on the fact that CPAs do not in fact have a monopoly on good tax work, although it seems that people just use CPA to mean tax preparers. So thanks for fighting the good fight and representing your crowd.

Michael Eckstein: Sometimes I have to like correct people, but I am not actually a CPA. Please do not say that. Please do not put that on

Michael Eckstein: things.

Steven Jarvis: For people listening, they might not really get like why you, because like this isn’t, well, you tell me if I’m wrong, but this isn’t like, how dare you, I’m offended you’d call me a CPA because most people listening to this podcast are financial advisors, they’re a CFP. There’s some other designation that really is like a registered trademark. And worse, if you pretend to be a CFP and aren’t, you’re going to get a cease and desist letter. If you pretend to be a CPA and aren’t, you can go to jail.

Michael Eckstein: Yeah, you still get like a cease and desist, but it’s like way scarier because it’s whichever state just sent you a cease and desist, you know, it’s not like the CFP and they’re like, oh, don’t say that you’ve got Texas being like, don’t ever do that again. I swear to God, I’m going to ruin your life. And Texas side note is like on top of it. I had a buddy. I’ve heard a few stories with a Texas CPA board or whatever. I have a buddy. He was a New York CPA. He moves to Texas. He updates his LinkedIn profile to say he lives in Texas. They reach out to him and say, you were not licensed in Texas. Take that off.

Steven Jarvis : Uh-huh. That’s wild. Texas watches the CPA. Wow.

Michael Eckstein : And they’re very serious.

Michael Eckstein: And, you know, the reason for that, of course, is that the CPA does give you certain kinds of powers. Most importantly, the right to represent clients before the IRS, which enrolled agents can do as well. Right. Which is a side note for people listening. Representing before the IRS is not preparing tax returns. Technically, anyone can prepare a tax return. You don’t need a license. You just need a PTIN and they’ll just give it to you. Right. It’s not a barrier to entry. The IRS tried to put a barrier to entry. And then I think there’s a Supreme Court case that said the IRS isn’t allowed to put a barrier to entry. It’s just the PTIN. So representation rights is if I get power of attorney on you, I can call on your behalf.

Steven Jarvis : Yeah.

Michael Eckstein: And I can make agreements with the IRS. I can get you into an installment agreement or an offer in compromise. I can argue about an audit. The second thing the CPA has is they can do attest and assurance, which is essentially like if you needed audited financials for your business to go buy a new property or something at the bottom, a CPA signs off . So if you are one of the actual like deep finance nerds that’s reading like company publications and prospectuses and those sorts of things, somewhere, somewhere on that thing is a partner signature from a big four firm saying we swear it all looks really good. Right. And CPAs can do that. EAs can’t. And if I put myself out to be able to do that and I pretend I can do that, the various boards  are like very upset, which like rightfully so. It kind of is the bedrock of our financial system. But that’s a different discussion.

Steven Jarvis: Yeah. That’s a good summary of kind of the distinctions there. And we could do a whole several podcasts, many of them on the assurance side of things and whether that really does as much good as people think it does. Michael, part of the reason I wanted you on the podcast, we recently just wrapped up the summit 2026. We had over 300 advisors there doing a lot of great stuff around tax planning. If you missed out this year, you can go to retirementtaxservices.com/summit. You can already get signed up for next year. But Michael, there was this theme that got brought up a few times that I don’t think we really had the chance to fully address on stage. And it was really these questions around like, what does a tax preparation firm look like as far as what they charge, how they find clients, what a client can expect, like as far as the service being provided? Because especially for a financial advisor who is used to being very involved in their client’s lives, they’re having quarterly meetings, monthly meetings, phone calls, they’ve given out cell phone numbers and texting people like that blows my mind, nobody gets my cell phone number. And so there’s this huge contrast. And so you’re the first of several tax repairs. I’m bringing on the podcast to say, OK, let’s have this discussion of what is if a financial advisor is looking to help their client find a tax preparer, what can they expect?

Michael Eckstein: I think there’s a lot of ‘it depends’ in that answer.

Steven Jarvis : Yeah.

Michael Eckstein: Right. Like a good accountant. It depends. But just like you can look at the financial advising world and there’s different types of financial advising practices. There’s practices where they just put you in whatever model they have and everyone gets it. There’s ones where it’s super specialized. There’s high touch, there’s low touch. There’s all sorts in between. You have that with accounting too. Right. You do have the kind of low touch. You know, it’s a churn shop where they’re what I mean is they’re just churning through returns, getting them out the door, they’re doing them cheap, but they make money in volume. Right. So you can probably still find, especially depending on where you are in the country, a tax return for 200 bucks, 300 bucks. Right. And, you know, I don’t want to like kind of poo-poo that too much for some people. That is good enough. You know, some people they have a simple W2. They have maybe a little bit of interest income, investment income, but they’re not doing anything like fancy. Right. They could have done it themselves on TurboTax. And there’s a place for that kind of service, I feel.

Steven Jarvis: And Michael, I think the other thing that comes along with that, I think there’s the complexity issue, which I’m with you. There are people with simple tax situations where giving it to one of these high volume shops so that you don’t have to get on a website and do it yourself. That can make sense. But the other thing that comes with that is you also then can’t expect to have questions answered. You can’t expect to have live dialogue. Like if you’re paying probably even up to like $500 for a simple individual return, this is probably like a self-guided portal and maybe a couple of emails and it’s done. Like that’s that’s about the extent of what you’re going to get.

Michael Eckstein: And it’s also in that case, when you hear a lot of complaints about my accountant doesn’t get back to me, it tends to be that sort of situation where they are doing a large volume of lower-priced returns. The reason they don’t get back to you is because they have such a large volume of

Michael Eckstein: work and they have to get through it to pay their own bills. And emails aren’t really kind of priced into that equation for them, you know, which is like, again, fine for some people. Going up to the higher end, you do have higher touch accountants that now charge maybe a minimum of $1,000, if not more, I guess if you’re a big four mid-sized firms, it does get bigger in the middle. And the service you get there can depend. Still. I don’t think every $1,000 return is a beautiful service.

Michael Eckstein: For example, for me, I charge $1,000 for a tax return. There’s still a fair amount of please upload the things to the portal.

Steven Jarvis : Yeah.

Michael Eckstein: And fill out the survey. I’m not like coming to your house and helping you collect docs. You know what I mean? You just get answers to emails and someone actually understands some concepts a little bit more. Someone who’s heard of a straddle before, that sort of thing.

Steven Jarvis: Yeah. I mean, for us going into this next tax filing season, our tax returns will range between about $950 and you know, 1,300–1,400. Since we partner alongside financial advisors and essentially they are also paying to be part of our community that helps offset our cost to the client a little bit. And so I would say compared to some accountants at that price point, we’re definitely more responsive that client has the option to do a live meeting to review their tax return with us. In general, we’ve got a 48 hour response time for most everything. But to your point, we definitely are still, hey, we do this virtually. We’re going to give you like a tailored list of documents for your situation, but we’re still like, yes, you need to upload them. And every now and then when we have a client who isn’t tech savvy, then we tell the advisor who introduced them to us like, hey, that means they’re coming to your office. None of my clients know where my physical office is because we run a virtual firm. Michael, one of the things I’ve started seeing a little bit more over the last couple of years is tax preparers who are starting to have more of a menu of services. It feels like it used to be like if I’m a tax prep firm, I do tax prep. That’s what I do. Maybe I charge differently depending on the complexity of your return, but I’m compliance focused. I turn out last year’s tax return. I move on with life. And so I am starting to see more tax preparers who are saying, you know what, there’s value to deliver and fees I can charge if I do some planning, if I do some quarterly check-ins. And so I’m seeing more people with kind of a menu of services. I think in most cases, it’s hard to break out of what you’re used to. A lot of those firms, the largest part of the revenue is still though the compliance work. What are you seeing in that kind of thing?

Michael Eckstein: I agree with that.

Michael Eckstein: I also see the kind of, I mean, I also sell some advisory services myself and I can tell you from being the guy selling it, at the end of the day, everyone doesn’t want it, but everyone needs compliance work and compliance does pay bills. So yeah, the shops that do sell advisory, maybe it’s not to all of their clients. And I also kind of will say that, in my opinion, advisory makes more sense either for businesses or a higher net worth. That there is a large group of people that would have a financial advisor and that financial advisor is doing the extent of the advisory and they don’t really need an accountant multiple times a year. Right? These multiple check-ins, that sort of thing.

Steven Jarvis: One of the things that we’ve seen is, and I’ll make this joke to clients because sometimes when we’re onboarding new clients, quite often when we’re onboarding new clients, they’re coming to us because they had a bad experience previously. And so they’ll ask questions up front of like, okay, but like how many times do we get to meet with you a year? And what I tell them is, hey, in my experience, most people don’t actually want to sit down with a CPA for hours on end. And we all kind of laugh because it’s definitely true. In my experience, what most people want is they want proactive responses when questions come up and they want to know there’s somebody out there who understands their situation and gives them specific advice. And so for the majority of our clients, we give them all the opportunity to meet with us live during the tax filing season. We collaborate with their financial advisor during the year. And really we’re only meeting with clients outside of tax time when other things come up, when they’re moving out of state, when they’re selling a business, when they’ve got a large income source they weren’t expecting, when they want to do Roth conversions, like when those things come up, absolutely. We get on Zoom calls, we respond to emails, whatever that is, but we don’t have recurring calls because who actually wants to talk about taxes that often?

Michael Eckstein: If you go to lots of websites, they’ll say we do quarterly meetings. And this is a good point. A lot of people think that, and I see it a lot on sales calls too, my last accountant didn’t give me the value I wanted, we didn’t communicate how we wanted, I feel like I should get more. And the obvious next thought is, well, what if we had quarterly meetings? But quarterly meetings don’t actually solve the problem. The problem was your accountant didn’t answer the emails. That’s the problem. Or you feel like you didn’t get more planning help. But quarterly meetings don’t really do anything. And I guess on the topic of what financial advisors should look for when finding an accountant for their client, here’s why I think quarterly meetings are bad. For a lot of people, there is not enough change quarter to quarter in their tax situation, especially if they have a basic W-2 job. And when I say basic, I mean they’re making anywhere up to a million dollars. Right?

Steven Jarvis: Yeah, no, thanks for that. That’s an important clarification. Basic is not the dollar amount, it’s what’s going on inside of it.

Michael Eckstein: There’s just not that much going on. And when situations come up, I mean, hopefully the client knows to reach out, like I have a client sending me questions, they’re trying to set up a crop  right now, and they’ll find questions about that. But a quarterly meeting wouldn’t help with that.  And my kind of problem with it is, if I offer you quarterly meetings, I have to charge for it.

Steven Jarvis : Yeah.

Michael Eckstein: Right? So I have to charge for the meeting, I have to charge the time before prepping, I have to charge for any sort of calculations I’m doing after. But there’s also a loss of time on your end, and there’s a cost to that on the client end. And when you look at it, as much as I want to make an extra few thousand dollars a year per client, I guess these are the business clients, there’s not enough value in there. And the last thing I want is to have a recurring meeting on the calendar, and the client doesn’t care about it, and they don’t go, and then eventually they leave, because why are they paying for all of this?

Steven Jarvis: Michael, when you talk about that sometimes you will sell advisory services, like what do you mean by advisory service? So what’s included in that?

Michael Eckstein: So for me, advisory is something very low end. I think in the past, I kind of drank the Kool-Aid on the whole, we should all do cash flow forecasting, and almost CFO slash business coach type thingy. For me, advisory is more being available all year. I guess the main advisory advisory, what the accounting space considers it, is year end tax planning, or S-corp planning, that sort of thing. So for me, and again, this is a business owner service, not really an individual client service. We do year end planning, and part of the point of that is to make sure everything is going according to plan, right? Earlier in the year, we may have had an email and you’re like, “Yeah, I’m going to make the same amount of revenue this year,” and that’s what we’re basing everything on. And we’re just checking at year-end. Is that accurate? Do we have to do year end tax planning? Do we have to catch up on estimates? Are we in a position where we have to shove down your income for some particular reason? Which is a whole other side note. I don’t love a deduction for the sake of a deduction. I don’t think you have to shove down your income every single year. At some point, you got to make money and you got to pay taxes on it. That’s what we’re all trying to do. Not the taxes, but the making the money part.

Michael Eckstein: But there are certain times when you’re like, “If I got right under this threshold, it would change how the deductions are calculated, QBI, cheer health responsibility payback , sometimes.” But yes, so year end, it’s to check in on everything going according to plan, quarterly estimates, take another look at maybe should this next year be an S-Corp. And for me personally, I remind my clients to save for retirement. Even though I can’t advise on retirement, I mean, the tax side I can’t. I can’t open the account. I can’t give any investment advice. And my experience with small business owners, when they are very small,

Michael Eckstein: which is the majority of small business owners, there’s really no one to remind them to save for retirement. And since there’s no one to remind them and it’s a tomorrow problem, it stays a tomorrow problem until they try and retire at like 65 and then there’s nothing.

Michael Eckstein : And that’s sad, too.

Steven Jarvis: Now, Mike, I love the way you’re describing that. There are so many of those things that I totally agree with. We take a similar approach, but I do like that you’re making this distinction and I want to make sure that’s clear to the audience that for most tax preparation firms, if you go to them and ask them to prepare a tax return and pay for preparing a tax return, that is all you’re paying for and that is all you’re going to get. You’re going to get that hyper focus in February, March, April timeframe, maybe later in the year if you go on extension. But it’s by default, it is

Steven Jarvis: not included that you’re going to have these extra conversations that someone’s going to proactively reach out to you. Unfortunately, there are a large number of tax firms that are making great money and have no incentive to change by just churning out tax returns each year. And so for advisors looking to help vet tax preparers for their clients or just get people plugged into the right place , these are questions you’ve got to ask and you’ve got to be willing to pay for. And as an advisor, you can make a huge difference in your client’s life if you help set expectations that, hey, it’s okay to pay for good service. And so, geez, at this point, I think I watched the Super Bowl with my son just because he likes the commercials and there always are commercials for H&R Block and TurboTax. Every single year, they have ad spends that dwarf what they spend more in a month on ads than I’ll make in my entire life. I’m pretty sure that’s an accurate measure. And so what that means is the general population is tied to this idea of I have to get a giant refund and taxes should be cheap and easy. It’s like, well, yeah, TurboTax is trying to be cheap and easy, sort of, until they get you in there and then it’s more complex and they charge you more. That’s a whole different thing. But we need to have clear expectations of fees are only an issue in the absence of value. Right. That’s that’s what everybody likes to say. Just ask the questions up front to understand what value you’re looking for and if you’re going to get it.

Michael Eckstein: Before even getting into finding the accountant, that advisor should figure out what kind of accountant they even want for their clients, because especially advisors that work with you guys, they are very value focused, very planning focused, very tax aware. So maybe they don’t even need an accountant. That’s reaching out proactively all year. Maybe they just need someone that is competent and has heard of various financial investing concepts. You know, I mean, like you don’t want an accountant that’s like never really put a Roth conversion on a tax return and, you know, to refer all your clients with Roth conversions over there, you know, so like they do have to know certain concepts and not every single accountant is going to be familiar with every single investment, especially as they start getting weirder. Let’s see, starting with things like oil and gas or straddles or that sort of thing.

Steven Jarvis: Right. That’s a great point. As the advisor, you should understand what tax forms your recommendations impact so that you can ask those questions so that you can confidently ask like, hey, what’s your process for getting the form 8606 filed? And if the accountant kind of looks at you like form 8606, what? OK, cool. That’s not the right person for you if you’re doing backdoor Roth contributions. I like that you highlighted kind of your approach near the end of the year, which as this is coming out, like we’re in that timeframe where we’re doing the same thing. We’re reaching back out to clients and just doing that quick check in to say, hey, did the year go as expected or did something else come up that we should know about? And for the majority of clients, it’s yep, it went as expected. Great. We’ll talk soon. But there’s always that percentage of clients where they say, oh, thanks for reaching out. I forgot to tell you. And then they unload this thing that you would have never guessed could have happened. You’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, we should probably talk about that. But being able to talk about that in October or November is completely different than talking about it in February.

Michael Eckstein: Yeah, because you can still make changes. Like once the year ends, you’re essentially stuck with like an IRA contribution. And like that is essentially all you can do. Towards the end of the year [CHECK AUDIO: timing]. Like sometimes you are in a situation where you can either open maybe some of the donor-advised fund, just some sort of trust, something like that. Or maybe you are in a position where you do want to spend big on some piece of equipment and depreciate it and shove this year’s income down . Right. Sometimes that is the right thing to do. Right. But even on this point with reaching out to everything, I think it does depend on the clients and like the financial advisors client list and who they’re working with. Right. Because if they say they are working with lower people making under like 500 grand a year, chances are there are not so many crazy tax situations that they need a check-in . Right. I would say that’s different if maybe it’s a business owner client or maybe they’re in a niche where their clients have a lot of foreign considerations. Maybe they work with a lot of people that came to the US or work abroad, that sort of thing. It depends on the situation with the client. So I don’t think every advisor listening to this needs to go and find their clients an advisory accountant. You know, if your client makes, you know, simple W2 income, it’s $250,000 a year and you’re just trying to get all the best practices in place and make sure they’re saving for retirement. We’re not doing anything nuts here. You don’t need the bells and whistles. I think. Yeah, not to sell compliance and advisory  because I know the industry is moving towards advisory is everything,

Michael Eckstein: but sometimes they don’t mean it. And I think we should also be aware of that and not send the clients to the expensive accountant that they don’t really need.

Steven Jarvis: Yeah. And the compliance still has to get done. Like all the advisory in the world doesn’t make the tax return not have to get filed. Unfortunately. For us, that’s a big part of the reason we still do tax compliance. Like there’s part of me. I mean, yes, a few thousand people will listen to this. There’s part of me that would be so happy to find out I never have to sign another tax return again in my life.

Michael Eckstein : We’ll see how it’s going soon.

Steven Jarvis : All right. Be careful what you wish for two years from now.

Michael Eckstein : We may never have a job, dude.

Steven Jarvis : All right.

Michael Eckstein : Be careful what you wish for . I’m going to start my own conference. My own group.

Steven Jarvis: Perfect. Perfect. Please start your own group. That’s anti all advancements and will always want to do compliance. But my point in that is like the compliance still has to get done. So you still need someone who’s going to get that tax return filed. It doesn’t count until it’s reported to the IRS correctly. And no matter how fast the industry side goes with advancements of technology, the IRS is a good 20 years behind on technology. And so we also have to have the IRS catch up on technology before compliance actually goes away.

Michael Eckstein: I’ve had some conversations with people trying to like break into the US tax tax scene. And that’s something that they were from another country. Like in our country, we can do this, this, this, that. And I was like, yeah, but you cannot get this information from the IRS. There’s just no way for you to do it. So that is why our like tax industry is so far behind.

Steven Jarvis: Michael, literally today and I have this situation at least a couple of times a year, but literally today I’m helping a client respond to an IRS letter. Our response is essentially giving the IRS information they already have and explaining to them how their rules work because the letter was a complete error. And we have multiple times a year where the IRS says, hey, you owe this much in taxes and we look at it and we’re like, yeah, but you ignored the withholdings on this W-2 that you already have a copy of. And now I’m taking time to explain to the IRS how their own rules work.

Michael Eckstein: And you know, maybe there is a point actually in this whole thing, right, that something for financial advisors to think about when they look for accountants. How do you want them to handle IRS letters?

Steven Jarvis: Yeah.

Michael Eckstein: That’s actually probably a very good question. What do you do if a client gets an IRS letter? So for me, regardless of the tier, I will read the letter for free. And I’ll tell you, this is literally nothing to worry about. They’re asking for $5. You didn’t give me that interest form to pay the $5 and move on. But if they want me to write a letter, that’s where the cost comes in. If for the clients on year-round subscription plans, advisory stuff, I will read and write letters for free. Just because with business owners, you just tend to get a lot of BS letters. You know, payable in some state  is upset about something and they’re wrong about it. But now someone has to read it and write it. And I approve that . But that’s something to think about. Like what do you want to happen if your client gets an IRS letter? And not every single client is getting an IRS letter. And most of them aren’t going to be a problem even if they get them. But do you want the accountant to be the point person? Do you want to be the point person? I mean, ideally someone is the point person. I don’t think you should have the client figure it out on their own because the letters aren’t that obvious. Right. Even the good letters are easy to read. Aren’t that obvious. So you do want someone that knows something to at least take a glance at it. So it’s like, do you want your accountant relationship? Do you want them to read letters? Do you want them to charge to read letters? Do you want them to write letters for free included? You know, what happens if there’s a mistake? What if the letter is the accountant’s fault? Like if I feel the letter is my fault, I’ll typically answer for free. That’s my bad. But not everyone does. Especially once you start getting to proper, I want to say proper firms. I’m solo. I don’t have employees. I can make all the rules here. Right. I can kind of discount my service by answering for free. But, you know, I’ve seen mid-sized firms. They’ll make a mistake and still charge to fix it. Right. And that’s not every firm I don’t want to throw them all under the bus. But like when you’re billing hours, a lot of the time is how it goes.

Steven Jarvis: That was fascinating to me the first time I saw that because you’re right. It happens more often than I think it should. But it’s like like I get you to charge for your time. But if it was your mistake, you could have prevented. Isn’t there some like professional responsibility there of like, hey, my bad, like, let me take care of this? But no, there are definitely firms who don’t take that approach.

Michael Eckstein: But these are I think things to think about. So I think part of the whole point of this conversation, I guess, is how can advisors find accountants to work with? And I think it’s very hard to test a professional’s competency. Right. Just because no matter how much the advisors listening to this know about tax, realistically, a somewhat competent accountant will know more and they can talk just beyond the advisor and make it seem like they know what they’re talking about. And I think advisors will kind of understand this when they talk to other advisors, like you know, when someone is trying to use all the big words and isn’t really saying anything. Right. And accountants can suss out amongst ourselves. Like if I’m talking to someone, they start explaining what like conceptually depreciation is, I’m like, all right, we are in different, different places in our this is, I guess, a little tangent. I hate when I’m reading an article and they explain depreciation. I’m like, I’ll just close this. This is clearly not what I’m looking for. If you have to explain depreciation, the same. I’m looking for something way more authoritative. But I think it is very hard to test a professional’s technical ability, especially how do you hit every single thing you need to know? Like, yes, there’s more common ones like ask about Roth conversions or 8606, ask if they can catch Roth conversions  on their own. If they see the seven thousand dollar ten ninety nine and they know that’s a Roth conversion. And like I know that the advisors listening to this are going to send some info ahead of time. But, you know, it’s like when the teacher sends home a note with your kid, it doesn’t get to you all the time. You know, they give the kid the note and they’re like, yeah, give this to Mom and Dad  and they don’t. And then you are signing this permission slip before you leave for work in the morning. Right. And you’re getting the poster board at nine p.m. And it’s the same thing. You know, the accountant may not know to ask for a letter from the financial advisor because a lot of advisors don’t provide it, but they know to ask the ten ninety nine B because they know that exists.

Steven Jarvis: Great reminder of why that year-end 1099 letter is so important. For an advisor who wants to set themselves apart because I mean, to your point, Michael, most people aren’t doing that sort of a thing. But as an advisor, if you if you want to build good relationships with tax repairs, take the time to highlight what it is you did during the year that’s going to have an impact at tax time, because this this isn’t even about whether it’s a good accountant or bad accountant. Those ten ninety nine don’t provide all the information unless you provide the context

Michael Eckstein: for a Roth conversion. Why maybe was a tech like a backdoor?  That’s the seven grand movement. If you’re doing something more complex, you know, this is the year we convert 50 K.  You know, that is not obvious on the form. And a good accountant will ask the client, hey, was this a distribution? Was this conversion? What is this? But sometimes a client doesn’t know. And they just kind of give an answer they think is right. And they give whatever to them. They’re like, oh, it’s distribution because maybe they misremembered the conversation with the adviser. And I mean, I have no reason to doubt, you know, I am 1099 R over here. The client is

Michael Eckstein: in distribution. I have no reason to believe otherwise. Right. So sending information ahead of time is nice. It doesn’t have to be super in depth. I don’t even know the entire life story behind the Roth conversion and why we thought this was right. But flagging things like that or flagging, I guess, non-obvious things like exempt-interest dividends and things like that, or how much of whatever. Oh, these dividends were U.S. government dividends. If your 1099-B at your kind of broker, child’s custodian and whatever , isn’t breaking that info out, maybe you want to be the guy that does that, especially if you have a lot of the client’s money, those sorts of things. If that client has like tons of munis, it is not always the most obvious thing on 1099 that they’re there. And sometimes flagging that does make a difference because even if it’s a good accountant that’s trying their best and like, I’ll tell you from my own personal experience, I’m trying my best. And sometimes that info is buried on page 103. And it’s just like a little footnote. And it’s like, you’re not going to notice there’s hundreds of pages of documents that this client sent.

Steven Jarvis: Michael, I appreciate your perspective as always. If people listening want to learn more about what you’re up to or find more info about you, where do they look?

Michael Eckstein: You can find me on LinkedIn.

Michael Eckstein: I am Michael Eckstein. I’m just there yapping.

Steven Jarvis: That’s how you and I originally got connected. Resting Business Face. That was, that’s still one of my favorites.

Michael Eckstein: Thank you. And for people that are on this, that’s actually my firm name now.

Steven Jarvis: Yeah, I love it.

Michael Eckstein: I changed it.

Steven Jarvis: Michael, it’s a great time as always for everyone listening. I want to go back to something you said earlier, Michael, of like, take the time to evaluate like what kind of accountant, what kind of tax professional does this client need? Not everybody needs the deluxe service. Everybody needs somebody in their life who’s taking care of compliance. Right? Like some people are great to DIY. I’m not even anti DIY. There are some people for whom that makes total sense DIY away, but make sure you’re thinking about that of, okay, what is the outcome we’re looking for? And then I would ask those questions  to your point, Michael. It’s, I don’t know that I get carried away trying to vet their technical knowledge, ask questions about the forms they’re familiar with. What does communication outside of the filing season look like? What happens when my client gets an IRS letter? Like those are all questions that you can ask that don’t have a technical answer to them. So Michael, thanks for being here and for everyone listening until next time. Good luck out there and remember to tip your server, not the IRS.